Security: How to Prevent API Attacks
Application programming interfaces (APIs) play a crucial role for most modern software, web, and mobile applications. They provide access to databases, make integrations between different apps seamless, facilitate business processes, and more.
However, this also makes APIs a prime target for cyberattacks. Protecting your APIs from attacks is not just about safeguarding your data, it’s equally about ensuring the integrity and reliability of your services. In this article, we will talk about the most common types of API attacks and how you can prevent them.
If you’re in a hurry, here are the key methods to prevent API attacks:
Implement strong authentication and authorization.
Use HTTPS for data encryption.
Use rate limiting and throttling.
Validate all input data.
Regularly update and patch.
Monitor and log API activity.
Use API protection software and gateways.
Perform security tests and audits.
The Boom of APIs Sparking Risks of Attack
APIs have become deeply embedded in software development, cloud services, Internet of Things (IoT) applications, and more. Their rapid proliferation has allowed companies to build software quickly and innovatively, without having to build everything themselves. But this has inadvertently increased the risk of API abuse and attacks.
Virtually any organization that uses APIs to facilitate data exchange between systems is at risk, from e-commerce platforms where APIs handle payment processing to healthcare providers that use APIs for patient data management.
API attacks have only become more sophisticated over the years. Attackers usually exploit weaknesses like inadequate authentication, lax access controls, and unprotected endpoints. For example, a vulnerability in an API of Optus, Australia’s third-largest telecommunications company, led to a data breach that affected ten million Optus customers.
Common Types of API Attacks & How to Prevent Them
ATO & Brute Force
Account takeover (ATO) and brute force attacks are common threats in the API landscape. An ATO attack happens when a fraudster gains unauthorized access to a user’s account, often using stolen or guessed credentials. A brute force attack involves repeated attempts to guess login credentials.
Fraudsters like using ATO and brute force attacks because they can provide access to valuable data from user accounts. They’re also not hard to execute, in part because a large number of credentials are already available on the dark web, and because fraudsters use tools that automate login attempts at scale.
Just to give an idea, in 2022, over 50% of e-commerce merchants experienced more ATO attacks than before. Although all industries are at risk of ATO and brute force attacks, the e-commerce and financial industries are particularly vulnerable because of the value associated with their user accounts.
Prevention Methods
The following strategies will significantly reduce your risk of successful ATO and brute force attacks on your APIs:
Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA): Implement MFA to add an additional security layer, making it harder for attackers to gain unauthorized access to your APIs even if they have login credentials.
Strong Authentication Protocols: Employ robust authentication methods such as OAuth or JWT (JSON Web Tokens) to ensure that only legitimate users access the APIs.
Rate Limiting: Limit the number of API requests allowed from a single IP address within a specific time frame. This makes brute force attacks much harder to execute.
Account Lockout Policies: Temporarily lock user accounts after a certain number of failed login attempts to prevent continuous guessing of credentials.
Credential Stuffing
Credential stuffing is often the precursor to an ATO attack. It’s a type of cyberattack where attackers use stolen account credentials obtained from data breaches to gain unauthorized access to user accounts and APIs.
As with ATO and brute force attacks, credential stuffing is popular because so many credentials are either reused or already exposed. It can also be entirely automated and, if successful, provides access to profitable data.
Credential stuffing is so prevalent that, in 2022, the traffic coming from it surpassed the traffic of genuine login attempts in some countries. It affects companies of all sizes in all industries, from social media sites to gaming services to e-commerce platforms.
Prevention Methods
To combat credential stuffing attacks, along with what’s already been said in the above section, it’s best to use a range of defensive strategies:
Robust Credential Screening: Regularly check user credentials against known databases of compromised information to identify and flag stolen credentials.
Advanced User Authentication: Use advanced authentication methods, such as biometrics or one-time passwords, to enhance security beyond traditional username and password combinations.
Device Fingerprinting: Track and analyze devices used in login attempts to identify and block those commonly associated with fraudulent activities.
Regular User Password Resets: Encourage or enforce periodic password changes to reduce the window of opportunity for compromised credentials to be used.
Denial of Service & DDoS
Denial of service (DoS) and distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks are attempts to disrupt normal traffic of a targeted server, service, network, or API by overwhelming the target or its infrastructure with a flood of traffic. DDoS attacks use multiple compromised computer systems, making them more challenging to mitigate than DoS attacks.
DDoS attacks are easy to execute because there’s a wide range of DDoS-for-hire services and botnets that can execute these attacks automatically. They are also impactful, because they can bring down entire websites or services—which is why DDoS attacks are a popular way to extort money from businesses.
DDoS attacks are only growing larger in size. A new DDoS record was set in October 2023, when Google’s DDoS Response Team observed an attack that peaked at 398 million requests per second. By the time you’re reading this, that record may already have been broken.
Prevention Methods
To protect against DoS and DDoS attacks, consider the following strategies:
Network Redundancy: Build redundancy into your network infrastructure to handle excess traffic and maintain service continuity during an attack.
Scalable Infrastructure: Use scalable cloud-based services that can absorb and distribute high traffic loads during a DDoS attack.
Geo-Blocking: Block traffic from regions that are not relevant to your business but are known sources of DDoS attacks.
Content Delivery Networks (CDNs): Use CDNs to distribute content delivery load and absorb DDoS traffic.
Vulnerability Scanning
Vulnerability scanning is a type of cyberattack where attackers systematically scan APIs and web applications to identify security weaknesses or vulnerabilities. Unlike other attacks that directly exploit known vulnerabilities, vulnerability scanning is often the first step that attackers use to map out potential points of entry and weaknesses in your systems.
As with almost all other attacks on this list, vulnerability scanning can be entirely automated and doesn’t cost much money (if any at all). When a vulnerability is discovered, it provides the attacker easy access to valuable data or system control.
Prevention Methods
To defend against vulnerability scanning and potential subsequent attacks, adopt the following practices:
Patch Management: Keep all software, including APIs and their dependencies, up-to-date with the latest security patches and updates.
Secure Coding Practices: Follow secure coding guidelines to minimize vulnerabilities in your API from the outset.
Regular Security Audits and Assessments: Conduct frequent security audits and vulnerability assessments of your API infrastructure to identify and remediate potential weaknesses.
Anomaly Detection: Use anomaly detection systems to identify unusual patterns that might indicate a scanning attempt.
Carding Attacks
Carding attacks involve the unauthorized use of stolen credit card information to make fraudulent transactions. Attackers typically obtain credit card details from data breaches, phishing campaigns, or the dark web, and then use automated tools to test these details on various e-commerce and online payment platforms.
Carding attacks are often scattered across numerous sites to avoid detection. The first objective is to identify which card details are still active and valid for use in larger fraudulent transactions. Industries most at risk are e-commerce platforms, online services and subscriptions, and financial institutions.
Card fraud costs businesses a large amount of money every year. Card fraud losses increased by more than 10% between 2020 and 2021, costing businesses around the world over 30 billion dollars. Carding attacks not only lead to financial losses, but also damage your reputation and erode the trust you’ve built up with your customers.
Prevention Methods
To combat carding API abuse, implement the following measures:
Transaction Monitoring: Monitor transactions for suspicious patterns, such as multiple failed payments from different cards linked to the same IP address.
Velocity Checks: Implement velocity checks to flag multiple transaction attempts in a short period, which is indicative of carding activities.
Strong Authentication for Transactions: Use additional authentication methods, like 3D Secure, for online transactions to validate the legitimacy of the cardholder.
Limit Payment Attempts: Restrict the number of payment attempts allowed from a single account or IP address to reduce the effectiveness of brute force attempts.
Scraping & Data Harvesting
Scraping and data harvesting refer to the use of automated tools to extract large amounts of data from websites and APIs. While scraping can sometimes be benign or even beneficial, like search engine bots indexing web content, it becomes malicious when it’s used to steal sensitive data, undermine competitive advantage, or infringe on copyright.
In a scraping attack, bots are programmed to methodically access a website or an API and download vast quantities of data. This could include product details from e-commerce sites, user information from social networks, or other valuable data that can be exploited for competitive gain, resold, or used in phishing attacks.
Prevention Methods
To defend against scraping and data harvesting, consider implementing the following strategies:
User Behavior Analysis: Monitor and analyze user behavior to identify and block abnormal access patterns, such as high-frequency data requests.
Content Protection Measures: Implement measures to protect against the direct downloading of content, such as disabling right-click options or using image overlays.
API Throttling: Throttle API requests to limit the amount of data that can be accessed in a given timeframe.
Data Encryption: Encrypt sensitive data to make it more difficult for scrapers to extract usable information.
How to Identify an API Attack
Identifying an API attack promptly is crucial for minimizing its impact. Here are common indicators that suggest your API might be under attack:
Unusual Traffic Patterns: A sudden spike in traffic, especially from new or unusual IP addresses, can indicate an attack.
Frequent Login Failures: Multiple failed login attempts or password reset requests could signal a brute force or credential stuffing attack.
High Error Rates: An increased rate of server errors (like 5XX errors) might point to an attack trying to exploit vulnerabilities.
Unusual Outbound Data Traffic: Large amounts of data being sent from your API to unfamiliar locations could suggest data harvesting.
Slow Performance: A sudden slowdown in API performance might be due to a DoS or DDoS attack and should be investigated immediately.
New or Unrecognized Admin Accounts: Unexpected creation of admin accounts could indicate a successful breach.
Suspicious API Requests: Requests that do not follow normal patterns—such as high-frequency requests or requests with unusual headers—can be signs of malicious activity.
Alerts from Security Tools: Notifications from intrusion detection systems, firewalls, or other security tools can often be the first sign of an attack.
Unexpected Changes in Database: Unexplained modifications or deletions in your database could be the result of a successful attack.
Complaints from Users: Reports from users about unauthorized transactions, changes in their account details, or issues with logging in could indicate that your API has been compromised.
Irregularities in API Performance Metrics: Deviations from typical API usage metrics, like query response times and request patterns, can suggest an issue.
Geographical Irregularities: Receiving a high volume of traffic from countries where you don’t typically have users could be a sign of an attack.
Changes in File Integrity: Alterations in system files or configurations that were not done by your team could suggest a breach.
Failed Two-Factor Authentication Attempts: Multiple failed attempts to bypass MFA can be a clear warning sign.
API Endpoint Scanning: Detection of systematic access attempts to various API endpoints might indicate someone is trying to find a vulnerable point.
How to Mitigate the Risk of API Attacks
Effectively mitigating the risk of API attacks requires a combination of robust security measures, awareness, and the use of advanced tools. Along with API security best practices, using bot protection software is essential in safeguarding APIs against automated threats like credential stuffing, DDoS attacks, and scraping. These tools identify and block malicious bot activity while allowing legitimate traffic through.
The right bot protection solution offers features like:
Real-time threat intelligence to identify and block malicious IPs.
Behavioral analysis to distinguish between humans and bots.
CAPTCHA challenges to verify the authenticity of requests.
Continuous monitoring and anomaly detection.
Prevent API Attacks with DataDome
DataDome is the leading solution for protecting APIs from the automated threats listed in this article. It specializes in real-time bot detection and prevention, immediately distinguishing between harmful bots and genuine users. It blocks harmful bots—no matter how many there are—while letting genuine users through.
DataDome uses advanced AI algorithms that adapt and learn from every interaction, which means that its API defenses evolve along with the ever-changing landscape of cyberthreats. This automation is necessary if you want to stay ahead of the latest threats.
The DataDome solution also offers seamless integration with a variety of platforms, meaning that you won’t need to change your existing API infrastructure to accommodate it. Additionally, DataDome has a comprehensive and intuitive dashboard with real-time insights into your APIs, as well as the threats that DataDome has prevented.
DataDome also provides you with the flexibility to set up customizable protection rules for your specific business needs. And we provide round-the-clock support and incident response services to ensure that any issues are swiftly addressed, so your APIs are secure and operational at all times.
