Imperva releases API security solution as threats ramp up

Imperva has launched Imperva API Security with continuous API discovery and data classification. The product is deployed in any environment to provide visibility and protection of data across legacy and cloud-native applications.

As a service offering, it can be enabled by Imperva Cloud Web Application Firewall (WAF) customers or deployed as a standalone to gain visibility into all API traffic.

Imperva API Security provides protection for Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) in developer environments that often lack adequate security controls and are vulnerable to malicious or inadvertent exposure.

According to Gartner, "By 2024, API abuses and related data breaches will nearly double", predicts Mark O'Neil and Shameen Pillai, in the May 2021 report titled 'The 10 Things Software Engineering Leaders Need to Know About APIs'.

The volume of APIs are multiplying as organisations accelerate digital transformation and adopt modern application development approaches. The proportion of web traffic flowing from APIs has grown 30% in 2022, compared to the same period last year, according to an analysis of cloud WAF traffic by Imperva Research Labs.

As the volume of API traffic increases, it becomes a greater threat to an organisation's sensitive data. Motivated attackers will increasingly target APIs as the pathway to the underlying infrastructure and database, Imperva states.

Imperva API Security enables rapid, secure development by providing continuous visibility and protection for all APIs. The product mitigates the risk of data breaches and data leakage by uncovering shadow APIs, and suggests remediation for software developers and security administrators.

According to the company, key benefits of Imperva API Security include:

• Identify and classify data flowing through any API: Protecting APIs should be a direct extension of an organisation's strategy for securing sensitive data. Imperva API Security automatically discovers each API's full schema while identifying and classifying the data that flows through it.
• Continuous discovery of APIs and schema changes: Following activation, REST APIs are quickly detected to enable creation of a positive security model. API inventories are automatically updated, helping the security team keep pace with developers who frequently modify APIs in production.
• Flexible deployment model: Imperva API Security works across legacy, hybrid, and cloud-native environments including: Kubernetes, legacy monolithic apps, standalone microservices, web proxies, or API gateways that integrate with other existing infrastructure. The flexible deployment model provides protection for both public-facing and backend APIs in a single solution without slowing down development teams.
• Enable API governance: Gain visibility beyond the API endpoint and into each API's underlying payload. This context will help business leaders in highly regulated industries enforce a governance model and stop a potential data breach.

Imperva general manager application security Karl Triebes says, "Organisations need a new approach for protecting APIs as attacks multiply and increase in sophistication.

"Simply knowing how many APIs you have in your environment isn't enough. With the focus on protecting the underlying data, Imperva API Security is designed to help security and development teams work cooperatively without altering code or slowing down the development lifecycle."

Imperva API Security is a product designed to benefit security and development teams. As a core component of the Imperva Web Application - API Protection platform, customers can protect critical applications and infrastructure from online fraud, DDoS attacks, and API abuses, the company states.

IDC research director cybersecurity products Chris Rodriguez says, "Managing the security of APIs is one of the key business risks organisations face today as they accelerate the pace of software development. Protecting APIs should be seen as a critical dimension of a strong data security strategy.

"API security tools should provide the ability to discover and classify every API in and out of production. Organisations must act quickly as APIs will be the source of more data breaches in the coming years."