New Cloudflare Report Shows Organisations Struggle to Identify and Manage Cybersecurity Risks of APIs
Insights reveal that while APIs account for the majority of Internet traffic, they remain largely unsecured
Posted: Monday, Jan 15
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  • New Cloudflare Report Shows Organisations Struggle to Identify and Manage Cybersecurity Risks of APIs
New Cloudflare Report Shows Organisations Struggle to Identify and Manage Cybersecurity Risks of APIs

Sydney, January 10, 2024 โ€“ Cloudflare, Inc. (NYSE: NET), the leading connectivity cloud company, today published its inaugural API Security and Management Report. Findings from this year’s report reveal that APIs, a technology that underpins todayโ€™s most used sites and apps, are being leveraged by businesses more than everโ€”ultimately opening the door to more online threats than seen before. The report underscores the gap between organisations’ use of APIs and their ability to safeguard the data those APIs touch.โ€ฏย 

APIs power the digital worldโ€”our phones, smartwatches, banking systems and shopping sites all rely on APIs to communicate. They can help ecommerce sites accept payments, enable healthcare systems to securely share patient data, and even give taxis and public transportation access to real-time traffic data. Nearly every business today now uses them to build and provide better sites, apps and services to consumers. However, if unmanaged or unsecured, APIs present a goldmine for threat actors to exfiltrate potentially sensitive information.ย 

“APIs are central to how applications and websites work, which makes them a rich, and relatively new, target for hackers,” said Matthew Prince, CEO and co-founder at Cloudflare. “It’s vital that companies identify and protect all their APIs to prevent data breaches and secure their businesses.”

 

Key findings from Cloudflareโ€™s 2024 API Security and Management Reportย 

ยทย ย ย ย ย ย  Even unlikely industries see high spikes of API traffic: The seamless integrations that APIs allow for have driven organisations across industries to increasingly leverage them โ€“ some more quickly than others. The IoT, rail, bus and taxi, legal services, multimedia and games, and logistics and supply chain industries saw the highest share of API traffic in 2023.ย 

ยทย ย ย ย ย ย  API traffic accounts for the majority of Internet traffic: APIs dominate dynamic Internet traffic around the globe (57%), with each region that Cloudflare protects seeing an increase in usage over the past year. However, the top regions that explosively adopted APIs and witnessed the highest traffic share in 2023 were Africa and Asia.ย 

ยทย ย ย ย ย ย  APIs face an array of frequent and increasing threats: As with any popular business critical function that houses sensitive data, threat actors attempt to exploit any means necessary to gain access. The rise in popularity of APIs has also caused a rise in attack volume, with HTTP Anomaly, Injection attacks and file inclusion being the top three most commonly used attack types mitigated by Cloudflare.ย 

ยทย ย ย ย ย ย  Shadow APIs provide a defenseless path for threat actors: Organisations struggle to protect what they cannot see. Nearly 31% more API REST endpoints (when an API connects with the software program) were discovered through machine learning versus customer-provided identifiers โ€“ e.g., organisations lack a full inventory of their APIs.ย 

ยทย ย ย ย ย ย  DDoS mitigation solutions are one of the most effective tools to protect APIs: Regardless if an organisation has full visibility of all their APIs, DDoS mitigation solutions can help block potential threats. One-third (33%) of all mitigations applied to API threats were blocked by DDoS protections already in place.ย 

โ€œAPIs are powerful tools for developers to create full-featured, complex applications to serve their customers, partners, and employees, but each API is a potential attack surface that needs to be secured,โ€ said Melinda Marks, Practice Director, Cybersecurity, for Enterprise Strategy Group. โ€œAs this new report shows, organisations need more effective ways to address API security, including better visibility of APIs, ways to ensure secure authentication and authorisation between connections, and better ways to protect their applications from attacks.โ€โ€ฏย 

Report Methodology: The findings in this report, including the statistics included above, are based on traffic patterns observed by Cloudflareโ€™s global network (including Cloudflareโ€™s web application firewall, DDoS protection, bot management, and API gateway services) between Oct. 1, 2022 and Aug. 31, 2023. For the quarter ended September 30, 2023, Cloudflare served over 50 million HTTP requests per second on average, and blocked an average of 170 billion cyber threats each day.โ€ฏย 

To learn more, please check out the resources below:ย 

ยทย ย ย ย ย ย  2024 API Security and Management Reportย 

ยทย ย ย ย ย ย  Blog: Introducing Cloudflareโ€™s 2024 API security and management reportย 

ยทย ย ย ย ย ย  Cloudflare API Securityโ€ฏย 

ยทย ย ย ย ย ย  What is API Security?

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