APIs are crucial in our digital world, but they also introduce new vulnerabilities. Attackers often exploit these vulnerabilities by concealing malicious payloads within encrypted traffic, rendering them undetectable to traditional security tools. As we observe Cybersecurity Awareness Month, it's important to emphasize the significance of advanced solutions that can detect hidden threats.

Modern businesses are increasingly reliant on APIs. They are the building blocks facilitating data exchange and communication between disparate systems. Because of their prevalence and importance, they are also under attack by actors exploiting vulnerabilities and misconfigurations. Unauthorized access, data exposure, injection attacks, broken authentication, DoS attacks, shadow or unmanaged APIs, insecure API dependencies, and more present a real risk to APIs and the organizations that use them.

Envoy has carved out a critical role in cloud-native computing, becoming increasingly prevalent as the default ingress controller for Kubernetes. This high-performance proxy, developed by Lyft and now part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s arsenal, is integral for companies scaling up their Kubernetes deployments. Envoy ensures efficient load balancing, security, and operational agility by managing external access to services within Kubernetes clusters,.

As organizations adopt a “digital-first” mentality, APIs have essentially become the backbone of modern applications, providing seamless integration between services, platforms, and third-party systems. For businesses, APIs help streamline processes and for consumers, APIs enable smooth and easily accessible digital services. However, an increased reliance on and growing number of APIs has also made them prime targets for cyberattacks.

In the evolving landscape of digital threats, two growing concerns are proving costly for organizations worldwide: insecure APIs and bot attacks. A recent report highlights that these vulnerabilities have escalated dramatically, with global firms suffering financial losses between $94 billion to $186 billion annually. The exponential rise in API adoption, combined with AI-powered bot attacks, has created a perfect storm for cybercriminals to exploit.

Earlier this week we had the pleasure of hosting a regional API Security Summit in Chicago (well, actually in Lombard). These summits bring together the local cybersecurity community for half-day of API Security-focused content, including expert speakers and panelists. While this isn’t the first time we’ve organized an event like this, it was memorable for the quality of content and participants.

Consider a modern software application as a constellation of cities that dot the landscape. These cities are components such as databases, authentication services, business logic engines, and more. Requests travel between components carrying data just as citizens travel between cities carrying their belongings. The highways that connect the cities on this map are your APIs. Cities get the most attention, often receiving the security and protection they need.

In a groundbreaking move, some of the world’s largest telecom operators—América Móvil, AT&T, Bharti Airtel, Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Reliance Jio, Singtel, Telefonica, Telstra, T-Mobile, Verizon, and Vodafone—are partnering with Ericsson to launch a new venture aimed at transforming how network Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are accessed and used.

Developers are constantly exploring new technologies that can improve the performance, flexibility, and usability of applications. GraphQL is one such technology that has gained significant attention for its ability to fetch data efficiently. Unlike the traditional REST API, which requires multiple round trips to the server to gather various pieces of data, GraphQL allows developers to retrieve all the needed data in a single request.

Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) have become the backbone of modern applications. They enable seamless interaction between different software systems, allowing businesses to innovate rapidly. With the proliferation of APIs comes an increased risk of security vulnerabilities. Ensuring API security is crucial to safeguarding sensitive data, maintaining user trust and protecting the integrity of applications.