APIs are essential for building a robust and continuous communication bridge that enables devices to seamlessly deliver the information they need. However, hackers use a variety of ways to exploit APIs and compromise targeted devices, and this API development is a potential threat to API security. If the threat modeling phase of API design doesn't take into account the execution of port locking, and no compensating controls are added, then these APIs are at risk of being "abused." API abuse refers to the mishandling of APIs, gaining unsanctioned access, and modifying critical functionality so that the APIs can be used by hostile processes such as attacking or overloading servers. It is performed with the help of bots, phishing attacks, or manual insertion of malicious **.
Since APIs usually correspond to a large amount of ** value data and are also highly concerned by various automated crawler tools, platform operators are affected by wool picking and data theft, and the use of APIs is often affected by threats such as traffic occupation and cannot work normally.
Enterprises often feel that their APIs are secure and "perfect" because they have passed the vulnerability assessment. But the biggest API protection gap is the protection of APIs that are open to partners and can be easily abused. Even if APIs are perfectly written and free of vulnerabilities, they can be abused in unexpected ways, exposing the core business functions and data of the organizations that share them.
Why are APIs always targeted by attackers? In a nutshell, there are three reasons: first, the goal is easy to find: the responsibility of the API is to call between applications, which is naturally public and exposed; 2. The potential benefit of the attack is high: The API carries a large amount of important data and authentication information, and once the attacker successfully breaks through the API. Direct access to the core system. 3. Difficulty in preventing attacks: A large number of API permission control is not refined enough, and it is easy for attackers to find vulnerabilities and easily bypass border protection.
A prime example of this is the Cambridge Analytica (CA) scandal of 2018. In that incident, CA leveraged Facebook's open API to collect massive data on at least 87 million users. This is achieved through the use of the Facebook quiz app, which utilizes a permission setting that allows third-party apps to collect information about the quizzers, as well as the interests, location data, and more of all their friends. This information is then given to various political campaigns. Its full impact may never be known, but the recognized impact had a significant impact on the 2016 Brexit referendums in the United States*** and the United Kingdom. The incident also led to an immediate hit to Facebook's market capitalization of more than $100 billion, fines of more than billions of dollars, and remained a target of regulators for years to come.
All of this does not involve exploiting infrastructure vulnerabilities in Facebook's API infrastructure. Facebook exposed a core business API that ended up being abused, and the CA simply used Facebook's public API in ways that were not intended or anticipated when it was created.
There are several ways that enterprises can avoid API attacks:
1.Regularly update API versions: By upgrading APIs, you can patch vulnerabilities and defects in previous versions and improve the security of your program.
2.Restrict access to APIs: Properly setting access to APIs is an effective way to prevent security threats, and only allow them to be opened when they need to be called.
3.Filter and check the input data: Check and filter the input data to prevent excessive data from causing attacks on API requests.
4.Conduct security reviews: Audits are an important way to reduce the number of vulnerabilities and security flaws in your inventory and to fix security vulnerabilities as they become discovered.
5.Limit the frequency of API calls: Set the maximum number and rate of API requests to avoid security problems caused by frequent requests.
Digital fusionIt has strong integration capabilitiesto seamlessly connect systems, applications, and data sources inside and outside the enterprise. It supports a variety of integration methods, including API integration, data integration, etc., so that enterprises can achieve rapid integration between systems and real-time data transmission. Whether it's integration with in-house systems, or integration with partners and third-party services, Data Fusion is able to provide flexible and scalable solutions.
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