Mumbai: Organisations struggle to identify and manage cybersecurity risks of APIs, according to a new Cloudflare report. APIs, as a technology, are most used today by sites and apps and are being leveraged by businesses more than ever, making them highly prone to online threats and cyberattacks.

Cybersecurity risks of APIs

Cloudflare’s inaugural API Security and Management report underscores the gap between organisations’ use of APIs and their ability to safeguard the data those APIs touch.

APIs power the digital world, including smartphones, smartwatches, banking systems and shopping sites all rely on APIs to communicate. They can help e-commerce sites accept payments, enable healthcare systems to securely share patient data, and even give taxis and public transportation access to real-time traffic data.

APIs – a goldmine for threat actors

Nearly every business today now uses them to build and provide better sites, apps and services to consumers. However, if unmanaged or unsecured, APIs present a goldmine for threat actors to exfiltrate potentially sensitive information.

“APIs are central to how applications and websites work, which makes them a rich, and relatively new, target for hackers,” said Matthew Prince, CEO and Co-Founder of Cloudflare.

“It’s vital that companies identify and protect all their APIs to prevent data breaches and secure their businesses,” added Prince.

Key findings from Cloudflare’s 2024 API Security and Management report include:

Even unlikely industries see high spikes of API traffic: The seamless integrations that APIs allow for have driven organisations across industries to increasingly leverage them – some more quickly than others. The IoT, rail, bus and taxi, legal services, multimedia and games, and logistics and supply chain industries saw the highest share of API traffic in 2023.

API traffic accounts for the majority of Internet traffic: APIs dominate dynamic Internet traffic around the globe (57%), with each region that Cloudflare protects seeing an increase in usage over the past year. However, the top regions that explosively adopted APIs and witnessed the highest traffic share in 2023 were Africa and Asia.

APIs face an array of frequent and increasing threats: As with any popular business critical function that houses sensitive data, threat actors attempt to exploit any means necessary to gain access. The rise in popularity of APIs has also caused a rise in attack volume, with HTTP anomaly, injection attacks and file inclusion being the top three most commonly used attack types mitigated by Cloudflare.

Shadow APIs provide a defenceless path for threat actors: Organisations struggle to protect what they cannot see. Nearly 31% more API REST endpoints (when an API connects with the software program) were discovered through machine learning versus customer-provided identifiers – e.g., organisations lack a full inventory of their APIs.

DDoS mitigation solutions are one of the most effective tools to protect APIs: Regardless if an organisation has full visibility of all their APIs, DDoS mitigation solutions can help block potential threats. One-third (33%) of all mitigations applied to API threats were blocked by DDoS protections already in place.

“APIs are powerful tools for developers to create full-featured, complex applications to serve their customers, partners, and employees, but each API is a potential attack surface that needs to be secured,” said Melinda Marks, Practice Director, Cybersecurity, for Enterprise Strategy Group.

“As this new report shows, organisations need more effective ways to address API security, including better visibility of APIs, ways to ensure secure authentication and authorisation between connections, and better ways to protect their applications from attacks.”