API Security Exposed: The Role of API Vulnerabilities in Real-World Data Breaches

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By Alfredo Oliveria and David Fiser

You wake up and start your day as usual when text notifications start popping up on your phone — the company is facing a massive data breach, and its reputation is at stake. Everyone in the organization is scrambling as customers are asking questions and a single mistake could cost the company a fortune.

All of it happened, because of an exploited vulnerability in API implementation. Some call it a misconfiguration. The organization's board disagrees.

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This research discusses real-world API vulnerabilities and shows the risks companies face every day. We start our journey with two popular API gateways: APISIX and Kong. We found over 600 APISIX instances and hundreds of thousands of Kong gateways accessible online. Each one is a door waiting for attackers to knock.

However, the API problems do not end here. Knowing the microservices powering API backends, we analyzed open container image registries and found a massive 9.31 TB data breach affecting multiple companies. The data includes everything from API keys for third-party systems integrations to entire codebases, all available for download.

Thinking the cloud will solve API security concerns might be shortsighted, as we found critical security flaws in Azure services that allow attackers to take over entire clusters from just one compromised container. Even tech giants like Microsoft can overlook critical security gaps.

In the end, we know that highlighting the problems is not enough. Instead, we offer actionable solutions and practical steps to secure API systems. By adopting an attacker mindset, you will be able to reevaluate your authentication, logging, secret management, and your overall DevOps pipeline to ensure a robust API security strategy.

This research provides insights for dealing with API security, which should help employees from DevOps engineers to CTOs. By the end, you will understand the full scope of API security challenges and be equipped to handle them.