Strengthen Your Cyber Insurance Position: Why Proactive API Security is Key

Navigating the cyber insurance market in 2025 feels tougher than ever. Premiums are rising, requirements are stricter, and underwriters are scrutinizing security controls with unprecedented detail. While you’re likely focused on endpoint security, MFA, and backups, are you overlooking a critical attack surface that insurers increasingly care about? Your Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) – the engines driving modern applications and data exchange – might be the missing piece in your cyber insurance puzzle, potentially putting your coverage and premiums at risk.

The Insurer’s Growing Focus on APIs

Why the sudden attention on APIs? Insurers recognize that APIs are now integral to their business operations. They connect critical systems, handle sensitive customer data (PII, PHI, PCI), and power digital experiences. Unfortunately, this also makes them prime targets for attackers. Breaches originating from insecure APIs can be devastatingly costly, leading to significant data loss, business disruption, and regulatory fines – exactly the kinds of losses cyber insurance is meant to cover, and thus, exactly the kinds of risks insurers want to see minimized.

Although your insurance application may not yet have a dedicated “API Security” section, many standard requirements implicitly require it. Effective vulnerability management must include API testing. Robust access controls and MFA need to extend to API endpoints. Advanced threat detection, like EDR, is crucial, but what about detecting threats specifically targeting your API logic? Increasingly, underwriters are moving beyond implicit requirements and asking direct questions about how organizations discover, test, monitor, and protect their APIs.

The Common API Security Gaps Risking Your Coverage

Many organizations struggle with API security due to several common challenges:

• Lack of Visibility: You can’t secure what you can’t see. The proliferation of “shadow” (unknown) and “zombie” (inactive but exposed) APIs creates a vast, unmanaged attack surface.
• Inadequate Testing: Traditional security tools often miss complex API logic flaws, such as Broken Object Level Authorization (BOLA) – one of the most common and damaging API vulnerabilities listed in the OWASP API Security Top 10.
• Misconfigurations and Design Flaws: Weak authentication, improper authorization, lack of rate limiting, and other design flaws can leave APIs vulnerable to abuse.
• Insufficient Runtime Protection: Firewalls and API gateways provide essential perimeter defense but often fail to detect subtle attacks targeting API logic or sequences of seemingly legitimate API calls.

These gaps significantly increase your risk profile in the eyes of an insurer, potentially leading to higher premiums, lower coverage limits, specific exclusions, or even outright denial of coverage.

Closing the Gap: The Role of Proactive API Security

Addressing these challenges requires a dedicated, lifecycle approach to API security. This is where solutions like Salt Security come in, providing the critical capabilities needed to demonstrate robust API risk management to insurers:

1. Continuous API Discovery: Establishing and maintaining a complete, accurate inventory of all APIs (internal, external, third-party, shadow, zombie) is foundational. This demonstrates to insurers that you understand your full API attack surface.
2. API Posture Governance: Proactively identifying and remediating security gaps during development and testing is crucial. This involves analyzing APIs for design flaws, misconfigurations, and vulnerabilities before they reach production, proving due diligence and adherence to security best practices.
3. Behavioral Threat Protection: Real-time detection and blocking of active threats targeting your APIs is essential. By leveraging AI and machine learning to understand normal API behavior, you can identify and stop sophisticated attacks (like BOLA, credential stuffing, and data exfiltration attempts) that bypass traditional defenses – effectively acting as an “EDR for your APIs.”

Strengthening Your Insurance Position

By implementing a comprehensive API security strategy leveraging these capabilities, you can:

• Provide Concrete Evidence: Confidently answer underwriter questionnaires and provide documentation of your API inventory, testing processes, and runtime protection controls.
• Demonstrate Proactive Risk Management: Show insurers you are taking API security seriously, reducing your perceived risk.
• Minimize Claim Likelihood: Actively prevent API breaches that could lead to costly insurance claims.
• Enhance Negotiation Power: A robust, verifiable security posture across all attack surfaces, including APIs, positions you more favorably when negotiating insurance terms and premiums.

Conclusion

As cyber insurers intensify their scrutiny of security controls, leaving your APIs unsecured is no longer an option. It’s a significant blind spot that can jeopardize your ability to obtain adequate and affordable coverage. Take proactive steps today to understand your API landscape, identify weaknesses, and implement robust protection.

Ready to assess your API security posture for cyber insurance readiness? Download our checklist or schedule a demo to see how Salt Security provides the industry-leading platform to discover, govern, and protect your essential APIs.

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*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Salt Security blog authored by Eric Schwake. Read the original post at: https://salt.security/blog/strengthen-your-cyber-insurance-position-why-proactive-api-security-is-key