API Abuse Prevention

The Wallarm API Abuse Prevention module, delivered on the Wallarm API Security Platform, provides comprehensive real-time protection against detrimental automated behaviors – including malicious bots; account takeover (ATO), credential stuffing, and application layer (L7) DDoS attacks; and more – which threaten to overwhelm your operations and defenses.

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Do You Need API Abuse Prevention?

Your API-first approach opens you up to API-specific abuse from malicious automated behavioral attacks such as bad bots, account takeover (ATO), credential stuffing, application layer (L7) DDoS, and more.

Your public-facing APIs are designed to be accessible, to support customers, partners and internal operations. This opens them up to abuse, such as malicious bots being used to scrape data, overload systems, and commit fraud – and can result in lost revenue, stolen customer data, and damage to your reputation.

Traditional security tools, including Rate Limiting and DDoS Protection, can be useful at reducing volumetric attacks, but generally cannot distinguish between legitimate and malicious traffic. And traditional Bot Management on API endpoints work reasonably well to find bad actors among human users.

But since APIs are automated, it's really about finding bad bots among other bots. To solve this problem, our approach is about intent and context — basically allowing you to assess the aims of each request, at scale.

Types of API Abuse

You need to protect your public-facing APIs against modern API-specific threats, such as those covered in OWASP API1:2023 (BOLA) and API9:2023 (Improper Inventory Management), which look familiar but behave differently. Examples include:

Account Takeover (ATO)

Malicious actor gains unauthorized access to an account, for example via credential stuffing, which can lead to severe consequences such as identity theft, financial losses, and reputational damage.

Case Study: Accellion FTA attack via CVE-2021-27103 (among others) in late-2020.

L7 API DoS Attacks

Layer-7 denial-of-service (DoS) attacks target your API at the application layer, overwhelming it with a high volume of API requests, which can lead the API to crash, making the application unavailable to legitimate users, and result in financial losses, reputational damage, and loss of user trust.

Case Study: Route 53 DNS web service on AWS in late-2020.

Scanning and Scraping

Automated scripts probe or scrape data from your API, often with malicious intent, which can lead to downtime, data breaches, and unauthorized data access, resulting in theft of IP or sensitive end user data.

Case Study: Scraping of the personal data of over 533 million Facebook users in mid-2021.

Guard Against API Abuse

Eliminate the gap in your API protections with an integrated and customizable approach from Wallarm to minimize the impact on your operations and legitimate users.

Detect & Protect

Guard against the blind spot in your API defenses by recognizing and differentiating between legitimate vs. malicious automated behaviors, and blocking those likely to cause harm based on your unique scenarios.

Consolidate

Wallarm API Abuse Prevention is delivered as part of the Wallarm API Platform, providing you with a single platform to protect your entire API estate and eliminating the need for additional workflows, which reduces the security team workload, effort, and budget.

Customize

APIs are designed to be open, so protecting them from abuse is a subtle balance involving access vs. protection. We allow you to assemble detectors and thresholds to tailor protections appropriate for your API estate.

API Abuse Prevention at a Glance

Wallarm API Abuse Prevention delivers the visibility, configurability and management capabilities to prevent malicious API - specific automated behavior from overwhelming your defenses and operations.

Visibility

Group and display indicators of automated behavior based on several factors, such as request pattern, timing anomalies, and API endpoint behavior, to provide visibility into potential harmful actions.

Configurability

Structure your API Abuse protections by leveraging any combination of multiple detector types and defining weighting and thresholds, to suit your specific needs.

Management

Monitor malicious behaviors, get in-depth contextual information on them, and adjust settings to optimize access for legitimate use and reduce operational workloads and costs.

Specialized

Wallarm API Abuse Prevention uses specialized detectors to identify and stop a wide range of malicious bot activities, including L7 DDoS attacks, credential stuffing / ATO, security crawlers, and content scanners / scrapers.

"It's Sexy! And it meets all of our API abuse prevention needs, providing us with the visibility, automated & configurable controls, and in-depth contextual insight to protect our legitimate users while blocking abusers."

Robert A., Information Technology Director, Large Hosting Company

Developer loved.
Security trusted.

Hundreds of Security and DevOps teams choose Wallarm to get unique visibility into malicious traffic, robust protection across the whole API portfolio, and automated incident response for product security programs.

200+

Enterprise customers

80+

Integrations and platforms

20,000+

Protected apps and APIs