Anatomy of API Security and Detecting Data Exposure Across Digital Government Systems

Why API security is imperative
In the race to meet customers’ needs, organizations face pressure to quickly develop and produce and enhance applications, services, and GenAI tools. This need for speed unfortunately results in a hidden risk: The APIs working behind the scenes for all these innovations are often built with misconfigurations, coding errors, and missing security controls. And when these APIs reach the production stage, it’s not just end users interacting with them; attackers are constantly testing out ways to compromise the APIs and access the data they exchange.

Misconfigured and compromised APIs are increasingly a key driver of significant data breaches, and yet few organizations are able to keep tabs on the thousands of API calls within their digital ecosystems. Fewer still are fully protected against runtime API threats. For example, in 2021, a fitness retail company found a bug in an API for user account data allowing anyone to make unauthenticated requests for data including age, gender, city, weight, and birthdate. While this vulnerability was thankfully detected and reported to the company by a security researcher, bugs like this can go unnoticed and be exploited for weeks or months.

When it comes to securing APIs, the traditional tools that organizations typically rely on — for example, API gateways and web application firewalls — can provide a baseline of protection. However, today’s security teams require additional security layers, as API attacks grow in number and sophistication. The key is augmenting existing controls with deeper insights into vulnerabilities, potential attack paths, malicious activity, and API behavior.

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