Bad Bots Are Coming for APIs
What Will API Insecurity Cost You?
Application Programming Interfaces, or APIs, are critical to modern business allowing machines to talk to each other, but they represent a vast attack surface that’s at risk today. They present highly lucrative targets for these reasons:
- Their requests provide direct access to the application backend, including resources and functionalities.
- They expose business logic, as developers use generic rulesets for APIs, opening them to vulnerabilities that are often exploited using bots mimicking human behaviour, including transaction fraud, web scraping, and data harvesting.
- They lack built-in defence mechanisms, making it difficult to detect and block malicious bot traffic and allowing attackers to use automation more freely without the risk of raising any alarms.
Because of these factors, APIs are attracting an alarmingly high number of bot-driven attacks that organisations are struggling to defend against. Today, a third of Internet traffic is made up of bad bots, leading automated, at scale attacks against people trying to do good things. Here’s the bigger picture:
32%
Of Internet traffic is bad bots
60%
Of bad bots are highly evasive
71%
Of all web traffic is API-related
613
Average number of API endpoints per organisation
1.5B
Average number of API calls enterprises handle annually
30%
Of API attacks are automated threats
*Imperva Economic Report 2024
How To Stop Bad Bots In Their Tracks
As Bad bots become more advanced and evasive and API adoption grows, investing in comprehensive API security and bot management solutions could substantially reduce API-related and bot-related losses.
Exclusive Networks, in partnership with Imperva, works with an expert network of partners ready to help you to better understand API and Bot Attacks and introduce you to Application Security solutions from Imperva.
The Imperva Application Security Platform helps organisations protect critical applications, APIs, and data anywhere, at scale, and delivers the highest ROI.
Features Include:
- API Security for continuous protection of all APIs using deep discovery and classification.
- Advanced Bot Protection for safeguarding websites, mobile applications, and APIs against today’s most sophisticated automated threats.
- On-Prem and Cloud Web Application Firewall (WAF) solutions for blocking the most critical web application security risks.
- Account Takeover Protection to safeguard login endpoints against malicious activity, including takeover attempts and new account fraud.
- Client-Side Protection for safeguarding websites against client-side attacks and streamlining regulatory compliance with PCI DSS 4.0.
- DDoS protection for websites, networks, and DNS to ensure business continuity with guaranteed uptime.
- Runtime Application Self-Protection (RASP) for security by default against known and zero-day vulnerabilities.
- Content Delivery Network for securely delivering applications worldwide with superior speed and performance.
Bot attacks affect businesses of all sizes. As organisations expand their digital footprint, they become increasingly attractive targets for both bot and API attacks. But what many organisations don’t realise is that the combination of API insecurity and bot attacks is causing them great loss. The average annual combined bot & API total global cyber loss is $94-186bn, according to the Imperva Economic Impact of API and Bot Attacks 2024 report. That’s a serious economic impact.’
Learn more:
Download the 2024 Imperva Economic Impact of API and Bot Attacks report
Take your Application Security free trial today to protect your APIs from Bad Bots
Talk to us about API and Bad Bot Protection for your customers
Partner with Imperva, a Thales company
Beginning a discussion with us about API and Bad Bot Protection as soon as possible will help you to minimise risk, disruption, and economic impact.
