Unified API Protection and API Security: What’s the Difference?

In a previous BlogI discussed the definition of what Unified API protection means and why organizations should adopt it over more traditional API security offerings. In today’s blog, I wanted to dive deeper into a side-by-side comparison to make the differences crystal clear. The distinction is important, given that APIs have become a development tool of choice in response to app mix, competitive business dynamics, and user expectations for seamless app experiences. APIs have brought speed and competitive advantage to businesses of all sizes, with IDC research calculating that 10 to 50% of company turnover is derived from APIs. The flip side of course is that the highly visible and well-defined nature of APIs has made it a irresistible target for attackers. As more and more organizations realize and recognize the size of their API footprint (revenue), it is becoming clear that new methods are needed to secure these APIs.

What is API Security?

Many companies will define their offering as meeting the need for API security, which is part of the problem. API Security is a broad and loosely defined group of solutions that will mean different things to different people. As shown in the publication recently ESG eBook, Trends in modern app protection, API security can be defined as improving the quality of API coding through API-specific testing tools. It can be defined as more traditional whack-a-mole blocking, or as simply discovery and tracking. Lack of consistency may be one of the reasons why more than 50% of respondents felt their API security tools were ineffective.

One of the possible reasons why respondents felt that their tools were ineffective is the lack of completeness of the offer. An API is different from a traditional web application. Designed for machine-to-machine interaction and stateless in nature, APIs include command, payload, and content. Applying security only in the development phase puts an excessive burden on the development team and does not address the fact that a perfectly coded API is always susceptible to attack. Applying security at the time of publication without considering the risk profile or possible coding errors is an invitation to introduce coding errors that can be exploited by attackers. A more comprehensive, end-to-end approach is needed.

API Protection Lifecycle Overview

The API protection lifecycle considers every stage an API will go through from inception to production, protecting all APIs, across all API implementations, channels and infrastructure environments, and all user groups and business use cases. The API protection lifecycle should incorporate discovery, inventory, compliance, detection, prevention, and testing, as shown in the image below.

It should be viewed as a continuum as each organization will fall into a different phase dictated by the maturity of their API. Seen in this light, the API protection lifecycle is a methodology designed to account for multiple types of risks and, more importantly, to provide a path to resolution.

Cequence Unified API Protection Solution

Analysis of the various API security offerings depicted in the ESG image above clearly shows their lack of effectiveness. As shown in the table below, each offering addresses a few of the API protection lifecycle phases, with none of them providing an end-to-end solution. This is until now.

The Cequence Unified API Protection is the only offering that covers all phases of the API protection lifecycle to defend your APIs against attacks and eliminate unknown and unmitigated security risks that can lead to data loss, fraud and service disruption. activities. The Unified API Protection solution includes:

• Spyder APIs: An API attack surface discovery and management tool that continuously assesses your public APIs and resources to show you exactly what an attacker sees from an outside perspective. API Spyder discovers your subdomains, the cloud hosting service used, any associated API endpoints, and servers that may be exploitable using vulnerabilities such as Log4j. Results are visualized in an easy-to-use dashboard for quick and easy correction.
• API Sentinel: Provides an inside view of your APIs by integrating with any piece of network infrastructure to create an up-to-the-minute catalog of all your APIs, managed or unmanaged. Predefined ML-based risk assessment rules help uncover sensitive data handling, weak or missing authentication, and specification compliance coding errors for remediation.
• Defense against robots: Detects and prevents the most sophisticated automated API attacks and business logic abuse using hundreds of ML rules that leverage an API threat database with billions of malicious behaviors, IP addresses and organizations. Native policy-based response options ensure that any detected attack is blocked, in real time, without relying on a third-party WAF or other security component.

Security teams that deploy Cequence Unified API Protection eliminate unknown, unprotected, and unmitigated API risks. They get continuous protection for their entire API risk surface, enabling their organizations to leverage the competitive and business advantages of ubiquitous API connectivity in a secure and compliant way. Ready to put Cequence Unified API Protection to the test? Request a personalized demo and FREE API security assessment now.

The post office Unified API Protection and API Security: What’s the Difference? appeared first on security sequence.

*** This is a syndicated blog from the Security Bloggers Network of security sequence written by Varun Kohli. Read the original post at: https://www.cequence.ai/unified-api-protection-vs-api-security-whats-the-difference/