Enterprise API Security: Why Enterprises Need A Proactive Approach
Enterprise API security is a top priority for any business using api and digital transformation solutions. Public cloud adoption and modern application architectures are causing API usage to surge, which in turn has created cascading security issues.
For the past several years, the industry’s primary focus has been to protect against enterprise API attacks — a reactive approach to block or mitigate the damage from bad actors attacking or exploiting APIs. But as Director of Security Evangelism at Noname Security, Matt Tesauro, pointed out on Help Net Security, “It is rare to see an attacker “break” an API. Rather, the most common threat vector is misconfigurations and weak links between APIs deployed in each piece of software.”
In other words, a cyber attack is more of a symptom and not the root cause of your API security issues. This thesis is validated by IBM Security X-Force’s research that found two-thirds of cloud breaches can be tied to misconfigured APIs.
Unfortunately for most enterprises, API attacks have been the primary means of discovering API misconfigurations.
Traditional API security solutions on the market only scan traffic and are looking for anomalous behavior. However, misconfigured APIs could leak data or provide backdoors for attackers that traffic-scanning tools couldn’t detect. Whatsmore, is that the issue of misconfigured APIs is rampant and affects most enterprises, whether they know it or not. And the number of APIs (and misconfigurations, for that matter) are growing at a pace faster than security organizations can detect and remediate them.
This api protection dilemma is one of the catalysts that lead to the genesis of Noname Security. Our founders decided to create an approach that would proactively eliminate attack surfaces.
Enterprise API Security: Why Enterprises Need A Proactive Approach
The Noname API Security Platform is built around 3 core pillars of functionality, and is designed to identify gaps in your security posture, protect your API estate, or environment in real-time, and ensure that all new additions or changes to your applications are safe and secure. Let’s explore each in more detail:
Enterprise API Security Posture Management
The saying, “You can’t secure what you can’t see”, applies to enterprise APIs perfectly. Most organizations don’t have visibility into their APIs and couldn’t even tell you how many APIs are in their environment. And if you don’t know how many APIs you have, you don’t know how many are communicating sensitive information or are communicating to the open web. The first step for any organization in enterprise API management is to get a complete inventory of their APIs, with data classification and configuration details. This prerequisite step identifies the misconfigurations and vulnerabilities that are just waiting for an attacker to exploit.
API Runtime Security
API runtime security leverages AI and ML-based models to intimately understand how APIs behave in real-time. Since Noname analyzes API configurations along with the traffic, the platform is able to detect more threats and create fewer false positives than other API security solutions. Noname also offers automated and semi-automated blocking and threat remediation across any cloud or on-premises environment.
Secure API SDLC
To truly solve enterprise API security challenges, Noname set out to make sure that nobody was unknowingly adding to the problem (e.g. deploying new APIs with misconfigurations or design flaws). That’s why Noname Security actively tests new and existing APIs, to proactively identify issues. By incorporating Noname Security, enterprises are the first to know if there is an issue, a welcome departure from using attackers to discover configuration issues.
These three pillars of the Noname API Security Platform enable enterprises to proactively reduce risk, verify the integrity of their APIs, and eliminate API attack surfaces. This complete, proactive approach to enterprise API security validated by our rapid adoption and why, after only 1 year out of stealth, Noname Security is the first API security unicorn.
Has your organization implemented a proactive approach to API Security? If not, reach out to Noname Security to get started today.
*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Noname API Security Blog authored by Chris Heggem. Read the original post at: https://nonamesecurity.com/blog/enterprise-api-security-why-enterprises-need-a-proactive-approach
