Proactive Runtime Protection Against API Abuse

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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Datasheet

API Security Challenge

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.

How Wallarm Helps

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.

FAQ

What are the key requirements for API security? - checklist

The key requirements for API security are:

Installed and configured Docker.
A created docker network.
Integrate and start containerized application.
Imported docker image within Wallarm API firewall.
Start, test and enable the API firewall

For more details visit this guide - Docker Firewall

How can we provide api security?

Wallarm provides API security by:

Analyzing all incoming HTTPS requests and instantly blocking all malicious requests.
Continuously collecting metrics from the entire network traffic & applies machine learning in the cloud.
Applies individual fine tuned security rules & scans vulnerabilities via a network scanner.

For more details visit this page - How Wallarm API Security works

How are API endpoints secured?

Wallarm API discovery identifies all API endpoints via its discovery feature. Once it discovers them it not only inspects API sepcific traffic attacks but also reconstructs API specs and behaviour based on the traffic.

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What is the best way to secure a Rails API?

Languages like Rails include JSON Web Token (JWT) which becomes vulnerable to attackers to attack by just using a JWT sample. You can test and secure Rails code by just using Wallarm shell command.

Find the shell command here - JWT secrets

How do I secure my custom PHP API?

Languages like PHP include JSON Web Token (JWT) which becomes vulnerable to attackers to attack by just using a JWT sample. You can test and secure PHP code by just using Wallarm shell command.

Find the shell command in this article - 340 weak JWT secrets

What is the best way to secure your PHP JSON REST API?

Languages like PHP include JSON Web Token (JWT) which becomes vulnerable to attackers to attack by just using a JWT sample. You can test and secure PHP code by just using Wallarm shell command.

Find the shell command here - 340 weak JWT secrets

What steps would you take in an API gateway to secure your API?

Scan malicious actors from traffic.
Implement OWASP protection for API threats.
Configure alerts and notifications
Integrate SIEM, SOAR and other tools to collect data logs.

Useful article - Wallarm connector to Apigee

What's the best way to vet APIs and related apps for hidden security vulnerabilities?

The best way to vet hidden security vulnerabilities are via Wallarm's:

Passive detection method: The vulnerability was found due to the security incident that occurred.
Active threat verification
Vulnerability scanner: All elements of the scope are scanned for typical vulnerabilities.

For more details visit article - Components of an active vulnerability scan

What is the best way to secure multiple APIs?

The best way to secure multiple APIs is to use Wallarm solution that enables you to integrate multiple APIs which can be managed and secured via a centralized user platform.

For more details watch the video on this page - Protecting Multiple Apps In Multiple Clouds

How do I secure api end points and parameters?

Implement API firewall which is a light-weighted API Firewall to protect your API endpoints in cloud-native environments with API Schema validation. Wallarm AI is a unique feature that automatically detects and parse complicated API protocols and then set up security rules based on specific data or parameters deep inside the API.

For more details visit this pages - API Firewall and Defining Wallarm API-specific Rules

What is the best tool for securing the APIS across multi-platform enterprises?

Wallarm multi-cloud platform provides key components to secure your business against emerging threats.

How do I ensure REST API security?

Use a strong authentication and authorisation solution
Prioritise security
Inventory and manage your APIs
Practice the principle of least privilege
Encrypt traffic using TLS
Remove information that’s not meant to be shared
Don’t expose more data than necessary
Validate input
Use rate limiting
Use a web application firewall

For more details visit this page - Rest API security best practices

What is the best rest api security software?

Wallarm is the best REST API security software that reports API Abuse, protects the Top 10 OWASP vulnerabilities and API threats, secures bots and provides L7 DDOS protection by g2 rating in the API security category

What is the best way to secure a flask restful api?

Flask RESTful API is based on python framework that can be scanned and vulnerabilities can be detected by defining Wallarm API-specific rules.

For more details visit this page - Defining Wallarm API-specific Rules

How do I secure the REST API in Spring Boot?

Spring Boot is an open source application that can be secured using Wallarm's machine learning feature.

How do I secure a private REST API?

Secure private APIs using:

Defense-in-Depth: Must be monitored for security issues at their respective ingress points.
Bot protection using automation: To distinguish “bad bots” from “good bots” that are just high-volume API calls.
Authentication: The most important issue is the correct implementation of API authentication and credential management

For more details visit this page - Key Considerations in API security

How do I correctly secure a RESTful API that will be used by both a web app and a mobile app?

Mobile applications use REST or gRPC API backends and data sources to render UI on our mobile phones and tablets. Web applications that use REST or GraphQL APIs as data sources and render their data to the beautiful UI in the browser.A Zero Trust for API security must be used to tackle and secure such applications using Wallarm.

For more details visit page - What does Zero Trust mean

What are some simple ways to secure my REST API service?

Use a strong authentication and authorisation solution
Prioritise security
Inventory and manage your APIs
Practice the principle of least privilege
Encrypt traffic using TLS
Remove information that’s not meant to be shared
Don’t expose more data than necessary
Validate input

For more details read this page - Rest API security

What is the best way to secure a RESTful API and only allow requests from your own application?

The best way to secure a RESTful API is by installing an Wallarm API Firewall. API Firewall is a reverse proxy with a built-in OpenAPI v3 request and response validator, written in Go, and optimised for extreme performance and near-zero added latency.

For more details visit this page - Securing REST with free API Firewall

How are you securing your REST API from bad actors?

Use a strong authentication and authorisation solution
Prioritise security
Inventory and manage your APIs
Practice the principle of least privilege
Encrypt traffic using TLS
Remove information that’s not meant to be shared
Don’t expose more data than necessary
Validate input
Use rate limiting
Use a web application firewall

For more details read this article - Securing web API best practices

What are the security testing tools available for testing REST APIs?

End-to-End API Security Solution tool provides the best testing capability to test REST APIs.

For more details visit this page - What Is API Testing

How secure are REST API calls?

End-to-End API Security Solution tool to secure by Intelligent parsing of API calls that automatically recognizes different protocols/formats and applies chain of parsers.

How do I secure a private REST API from hackers?

Secure private APIs using:

Defense-in-Depth: Must be monitored for security issues at their respective ingress points.
Bot protection using automation: To distinguish “bad bots” from “good bots” that are just high-volume API calls.
Authentication: The most important issue is the correct implementation of API authentication and credential management

For more details read this article - Key Considerations in API security

What is the best way to secure a B2B (server to server) multi-tenant REST API?

The best way to secure multiple tenant B2B APIs is to use Wallarm solution that enables you to integrate multiple APIs which can be managed and secured via a centralized user platform. Wallarm multi-cloud platform provides key components to secure your business against emerging threats.

For more details visit this page - How protecting multiple applications

What does the official website say?

According to the official website of OPA, OPA's flexibility, decoupling of policy decisions and policy enforcement from business logic and resource management offer several advantages for security and compliance-heavy applications. The website also provides various adoption patterns, operational modes, and information for using OPA with popular architectures and platforms.

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How does OPA work?

A: OPA works by intercepting requests to systems or services and evaluating them against a set of policies defined in a declarative language called Rego. If the request is allowed by the policy, it is granted. Otherwise, it is denied.

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What are the benefits of using OPA?

A: The benefits of using OPA include easier policy management and enforcement, improved security and compliance, centralized policy store, and ability to integrate with various cloud and container management tools.

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What can OPA be used for?

A: OPA can be used for a variety of use cases such as application-level access control, Kubernetes cluster authorization, and cloud security, to name a few.

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What is Open Policy Agent (OPA)?

A: Open Policy Agent (OPA) is an open-source policy engine that allows organizations to enforce policies across their systems and services in a consistent and scalable manner

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FEATURES & BENEFITS

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 including L7 DDoS attacks, credential stuffing / ATO, security crawlers, and content scanners / scrapers. One of the key advantages of this approach is that it is not based on JavaScript challenges, which have proven to be ineffective against API bots. Instead, it uses a combination of machine learning and rules-based algorithms to accurately detect and stop malicious bot activity.

"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

Early Access. Wallarm API Abuse Prevention is currently available via our Early Access Program (EAP), after months of work with Alpha users. Having already demonstrated the capabilities and value of our integrated API Abuse Prevention solution, EAP allows users to experience new features and functionalities ahead of full release. This enables you to stay ahead of the curve while also contributing to our continuous development and improvement efforts by reporting bugs, suggesting enhancements, and shaping its final form.