As the season of eerie zombies, shadows, and all things spine-chilling approaches, brace yourself for unexpected visitors at your doorstep. While Halloween is famed for its parade of spooky intruders, these horrors don’t simply disappear when November comes. Many organizations find themselves haunted throughout the year, but not in the way you might expect. The real terrors lurking within businesses aren’t hiding in closets or basements; they’re concealed as APIs within your infrastructure, biding their time to unleash chaos on your operations.
APIs are the backbone of modern applications, linking consumer applications and enterprises to essential data and services. As organizations increasingly embrace an API-driven economy, they encounter a daunting new challenge: API sprawl. This phenomenon refers to the rapid expansion of APIs within organizations globally, leading to significant difficulties in managing and securing them. Threat actors exploiting APIs have increased since the beginning of 2024. Notably, Dell suffered a data breach affecting 49 million customer records due to an API vulnerability. Attackers exploited an API accessible through the partner portal to access fake accounts, revealing a lack of robust API security controls like proper throttling and anomaly detection mechanisms. With the continuous creation of APIs, microservices, and endpoints, tracking their usage and ensuring their security becomes an ever-growing challenge.
With the rapid growth of API usage and the ensuing API sprawl, it’s crucial to prevent eerie and unwanted API entities like zombies and shadows from creeping into existence.
The Undead Threat Lurking in Your Infrastructure
Zombie APIs may not be chasing you down like the fictional characters we know, but they are lurking within the shadows, opening their creaking, forgotten doors to malicious actors.
Because they are essentially forgotten, zombie APIs don’t receive ongoing patching, maintenance, or updates in any functional or security capacity. This neglect transforms them into significant security risks. In fact, Salt Security’s 2024 State of API Security report named zombie APIs as organizations’ top API security concern. These situations can lead to the creation of zombie APIs:
- Deprecated APIs: APIs that were once used for specific features or services but were never adequately decommissioned.
- Dead APIs for Finished Projects: APIs developed for temporary projects or one-time events remain active even after the project has concluded.
- Test or Development APIs in Production: APIs used during the development or testing phase that are accidentally left active in the production environment.
- Acquired Company APIs: APIs from the acquired company that haven’t been fully integrated or retired.
Decaying in the shadows, these forsaken APIs become prime targets for cybercriminals. Much like the January Trello breach, where an unsecured API allowed the collection of 15 million email addresses associated with Trello accounts, these neglected APIs are highly susceptible to exploitation. Without regular updates, these undead APIs lack the necessary defenses against modern threats, leaving them vulnerable to attacks.
Hidden Phantoms in Your Network
Like the spine-chilling shadows hiding in the dark corners of our rooms, shadow APIs hide from IT administrators similarly. Shadow APIs exist within an organization’s environment but are undocumented, unmanaged, and often unknown to the IT and security teams. Shadow APIs can emerge in various forms and from different situations. Here are some examples of how they can be conjured:
- Developer-Created APIs: APIs created by developers for specific project needs without going through the official governance process.
- Third-Party Integrations: APIs from third-party services that are integrated into systems without full visibility or control by the organization’s IT department.
- Temporary Solutions: APIs created as quick fixes or temporary solutions for specific tasks that are then forgotten once the immediate need is resolved.
- Legacy Systems: APIs that were never fully integrated into the current API management framework.
In the darkness of cyberspace, hackers exploit shadow APIs like sinister phantoms to slip past security measures and gain unauthorized access to sensitive data. These shadow APIs, often devoid of proper security controls, become prime targets for hackers seeking to uncover confidential information. Once inside the network, these digital specters move laterally across systems, opening eerie gateways to other parts of the network and allowing attackers to escalate their privileges.
Exorcising Digital Ghouls and Mastering API Discovery and Governance
Discovering hidden vulnerabilities within your infrastructure can be challenging for IT and security teams, often creating a gap between awareness and action. Utilizing comprehensive API discovery technology is akin to shedding light on the darkest corners of your digital world, uncovering hidden entry points that might otherwise go unnoticed. This technology serves as a digital divining rod, detecting the presence of every API and providing a detailed map of your API ecosystem.
Once these hidden APIs are uncovered and their initial security posture assessed, it’s crucial to establish an API governance strategy. Think of it as creating a protective circle around your infrastructure, ensuring that every API adheres to strict security standards, from the newly created to the ancient and forgotten. This governance acts as a protective barrier, preventing rogue APIs from slipping through the cracks and causing harm. Finally, implementing robust API runtime protection is like deploying vigilant guardians who watch over your infrastructure, constantly scanning for signs of trouble. These watchful guardians not only react to disturbances but also can distinguish between harmless anomalies and truly malicious attacks, filtering out the merely unusual to identify and repel genuinely harmful threats. This ensures that your infrastructure remains safe and secure, even in the face of persistent digital threats.
If left unsecured, zombie and shadow APIs can unleash chaos across an organization’s infrastructure. Organizations must ensure robust API visibility, governance, and threat protection strategies are in place to banish these ghoulish nightmares back to the graveyard. By doing so, they can keep these spectral threats at bay and maintain a secure, haunted-free digital environment.
