APIs can be important for monitoring application integrity and business success, making it more convenient for users to use them. However, most businesses expose more individualized information such as data and other forms of information that can invite crime.
Insecure APIs can lead to poor authentication and affect statistics in a more worrisome way. You don’t need to worry because one of the tips to overcome this is by using monitoring to improve API security. As for the full explanation, you can check the following!
What is API Security?
API security is a process or effort made to protect the interface or programming from unwanted attacks or for the exploitation of theft of important sensitive data. APIs are an important way for software to interact with other software.
APIs are also a major attack vector for fraud, misuse or unwanted data loss. The existence of API security is aimed at the following important things!
- Detection of hackers gaining direct access to more sensitive data.
- Block and provide detection of unknown and known API attacks more easily.
- Helps protect data transmitted through APIs from inappropriate access or manipulation processes.
- Provide certainty of authorized users so that they can more easily access the API.
API itself has often experienced attacks that are increasing every year considering that not only technology is getting more modern but criminal acts are also getting fierce. API attacks in 2016 amounted to around 0.9 million then increased by 30 percent in 2017. The peak increase was in 2020 which was at 52 percent.
The existence of these breaches can cause crucial losses for organizations because they have to spend more money to meet forensic and investigative needs. Other costs that may also be incurred are fines incurred due to privacy violations that have been committed. Customers will also no longer trust your products or website.
How to Use Monitoring to Improve API Security?
There are several ways you can use monitoring to improve API security. You can see the full explanation below!
- Perform Third Party Integration Monitoring
In protecting APIs you need to take all measures to prevent unwanted exploitation but you also need to keep monitoring third-party integrations. Third parties here are also very vulnerable to exploitation and unwanted data exposure.
They may send sensitive data to third parties to carry out some kind of threat or direct attack on their system access. That way it is important to consider monitoring for uncharacteristic behavior including seeing certain access attempts from third parties involved in it.
- Use Monitoring to Gain API Shadow Discovery
The second way is to monitor and discover the shadows of the API to find out whether or not a company has committed a data breach. This shadow is crucial because it is the endpoint when it comes to unintentional code changes.
Without a proper API shadow monitoring process, the detection logging will not work properly. You need to find a platform that supports and offers better security posture management features in analyzing the code to determine the endpoints that have been obtained previously.
- Integrate with CI/CD Flow
The platform integration process of API security can use the CD/CI path from the beginning to help spot misconfigurations and bugs before being sent directly to production. You can immediately find vulnerabilities and make fixes as a form of added value including identifying more vulnerable code in the repair process.
This is why you need to choose a platform that is directly integrated with the C/CI procurement path needed to find more crucial vulnerabilities before release.
- Centralize Logging of All APIs Used
When you investigate things related to APIs, it will help you to be able to more easily connect some of the activities that enter the logs and systems. Examples of provisioning are firewalls, web servers and API monitoring carried out in them.
From all these logs you can go directly into a separate system and find logs to connect with other parts. That way you don’t have to waste more time and can move on to the tools that provide more visibility and crucial response capabilities.
This means that the process can directly focus on the logging process to help accelerate response time and detection in it.
- Integrating API Security Tools with IR Operations and User Security Teams
It is important to understand that the average time to detect a breach is around 200 days and that is long enough for attackers to look for opportunities to gain access to all the data you have. With the appropriate response team (IR), you can immediately monitor or provide a more solutive response.
You can help accelerate detection times and also compromise 100 days that can be used to contain a breach. Combined, that’s more than a year’s worth of business data that can be managed or compromised. As API attacks continue to increase every year, there is a need for a faster way to deal with them.
When data protection is in place, it allows you to realize the potential sooner as soon as it happens. The IR team will have immediate access to reports and alerts so that they can respond to incidents to address malicious activity.
- Centralize Logging of All APIs
When investigating API-related behavior you can help by correlating the activity of many logs and covering multiple systems within them from API monitoring to firewalls and web servers. All of these logs allow you to log into separate systems so it doesn’t take much time to access them.
- Define and Select the Security Objective or Basis of API Activity
Understand more about the business to be run regarding API points and also more efficient data protection as a benchmark for more normal activities in the long run. You can detect it in an easier way while predicting actions that do not fit the role. API Monitoring can be assisted by the use of Netmonk for a more thorough and consistent monitoring process. The results will also be better and the costs provided are also more affordable than monitoring manually without clear calculations.
