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API Security

We deliver expert cybersecurity services designed to protect, optimise, and future-proof your business, ensuring resilience, compliance & peace of mind in an ever-evolving digital landscape.

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API Security Testing

API endpoints can present a common target for real-world attacks as they can often access business-critical systems, present an alternative path to web apps to compromise your business and can often contain similar critical security issues to traditional web applications.

A number of common API vulnerabilities are known to impact API endpoints and can result from outdated software, misconfigurations, and insecure coding practices.

Our team have over 10 years of expertise conducting API security assessments.

We identify, evaluate and communicate the issues which pose a risk to your business.

We utilise a combination of best practice methodologies alongside years of industry experience

We use tried and tested approaches to identify the issues which present a critical risk to your business and API requests.

Our experienced cyber security professionals ensure you stay informed throughout the assessment process.

Through regular communication, scheduled calls, and ongoing support, we ensure you have all the information needed to understand and improve your cyber security posture.

Why Conduct A Security Assessment

Security incidents are often reported to have impacted over half of businesses and lead to costs and impacts which can be difficult to recover from. API penetration testing can help to provide assurance to your clients, peace of mind to your business owners, and to proactively address risks.

On average, over a hundred new vulnerabilities are disclosed each day, which may affect your API security.

When a business conducts API penetration testing it can uncover the vulnerabilities which impact your systems and help to identify solutions to improve your security posture.

Cyber Security has become increasingly prevalent as a client, partner and supplier requirement.

API pentesting can evidence your commitment to cybersecurity, illustrate your proactive approach to security and demonstrate a seriousness to information security best practices, helping to maintain the confidence of existing clients and win new business.

Where a cyber security incident does occur, there are often several associated costs involved, such as the time and resources required for recovery, and any relevant fines and penalties which may be levied against your business for not managing information security effectively.

Conducting API security testing can identify the areas of risk within your business and help to produce a cost-effective approach and targeted strategy to address these security weaknesses.

Multiple compliance standards focus on your cyber security posture and how a business manages information security effectively.

Regular Penetration Testing has become a staple component of compliance requirements, and can be conducted to align with your certification standards, and improve your organisation’s overall reputation for the secure management of information security.

Benefits of A Security Assessment

API penetration testing offers a range of benefits for your business to help improve overall security posture and gain a detailed knowledge of the real-world security risks which can impact your business.

The cost of a cyber security incident can quickly escalate due to downtime, reputational impacts, and information security fines. Implementing cyber security measures can also be a costly exercise if not focused on the areas which present a critical business risk.

Penetration testing services, can help to inform a vulnerability and risk management strategy, reducing the risk of an incident and targeting cyber security measures where needed.

Conducting regular API penetration testing can highlight the risks which attackers may use to steal user credentials and gain access to your business-critical systems.

This allows proactive steps to be taken to improve cyber security and resolve potential vulnerabilities.

Through conducting tests for the most common API vulnerabilities your teams can gain insight into how insecure development practices can introduce vulnerabilities into your systems, and how these compromises can lead to additional cyber attacks.

This information can be used to guide improvements to enhance your cyber security.

Our Approach

We deliver expert cybersecurity services designed to protect, optimise, and future-proof your business, ensuring resilience, compliance & peace of mind in an ever-evolving digital landscape.

The specific cyber security concerns your organisation has can vary, and it’s important to our team that your individual concerns and risks are always addressed.

Our penetration testing team work with you to produce and deliver a report which meets your requirements and helps achieve your goals.

Working alongside our cybersecurity consultants with over a decade of industry experience throughout your entire assessment process, from initial enquiry to project summary.

We provide help, support and guidance to ensure each of your security requirements are met.

Receive updates on your security weaknesses throughout the assessment.

Ensuring you stay informed and are never left in the dark about how your penetration test is progressing.

Security assessments don’t end with the report. Remediation, reassessments, and vulnerability management strategies all present ongoing challenges to address after a penetration test.

Our team ensure ongoing support is always available to help you address your immediate risks and achieve ongoing cyber security.

Popular Questions

The OWASP API Security Top Ten presents a list of the most common vulnerabilities which impact your API endpoints and can present a risk to your API security. This list includes:

  • Broken Object Level Authorization
  • Unrestricted Resource Consumption
  • Broken Authentication methods
  • Security Misconfigurations
  • Sensitive Data Exposure

API endpoints can be vulnerable in many different ways and can therefore present a range of different risks to a business.

  • Insecure authentication methods can lead to the compromise of user accounts. This could then allow access to sensitive client data.
  • Injection attacks can result in access to underlying databases, user credentials, and in some cases, lead to access to the operating system for the affected device.
  • The exposure of sensitive data, even email addresses, can aid in additional attacks such as targeted Phishing campaigns against your employees, clients, partners or suppliers.

Where a security issue does occur, there are several aspects which can impact your business:

  • The time required to recover from a security breach and restore your systems can incur costs such as recruiting people to aid in the recovery and the loss of business during any downtime.
  • The ongoing impacts on your business reputation can impact current and potential clients’ likelihood to work with you, as it can be seen as a security risk.
  • Fines and penalties can be levied against your business where a data breach occurs that impacts client data and personal data.

There are different benefits from both vulnerability scanning and penetration testing and each should be considered and applied for different reasons.

  • Vulnerability scanners and automated tools are useful for speed and are cost-effective, allowing them to be run on a regular basis. This is useful to identify the latest available security updates for known vulnerabilities, and can help maintain your ongoing security.
  • Penetration testing is useful for in-depth assessments, highlighting and contextualising API security vulnerabilities which scanning tools are often not able to identify. This can be useful when conducted on an annual basis, or after significant changes.

Although there can be several overlapping areas for security and testing techniques with a web application penetration test, APIs have their own security framework, and vulnerability analysis techniques, which can be followed to ensure your API endpoints are developed to a secure standard.

  • APIs are often accessed through authentication tokens or keys, which can have their own set of security issues for their creation and permission allocations.
  • While web applications may often incorporate security practices, such as rate limiting and brute force protection standards, these security mechanisms may not be present within API endpoints, allowing attackers to submit a large volume of requests, which can impact your server performance and response.
  • User input validation must be carefully conducted for an API to ensure that robust security practices are in place

Application Programming Interface (API) is a set of requests which defines the communication and data exchange between two devices. This can be through a web application or a mobile application and a server.

  • An API represents the requests that a web application can make to populate its web pages with content. Rather than being requests embedded within the web application, API’s are used to separate the presentation layer, such as the web application, from the requests for data, the API.
  • This allows the same API to be used to provide data to a web application, mobile application or any other solution. New solutions can then make use of existing API’s and authentication mechanisms, and their development can focus on the presentation of data.
  • API’s typically have API documentation to describe how their requests for data can be used, defining the request structure, parameters, and the expected response data.

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