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Random freezes, missing sound and display glitches usually trace back to one bad driver. Find and replace yours safely.Free scan · under a minuteAn API breach can expose customer records or let an attacker perform actions as another user when the service fails to verify what that caller is allowed to access. The risk is not limited to stolen passwords: authorization mistakes, excessive data exposure, weak resource limits, misconfiguration, and abuse of legitimate business workflows can all turn an API into a path to customer harm and business disruption. The most useful first steps are to inventory APIs, enforce authorization on the server for every object and action, and make API activity visible to responders.
Why APIs can widen the blast radius
APIs connect web and mobile apps to backend services, and also connect internal systems, partners, and automation. They expose application operations in a form that software can call repeatedly and at scale. An API may return personal information, change an account setting, initiate a payment, or trigger another business process.
That makes the authorization decision at each endpoint critical. A caller may be authenticated and still not be entitled to a particular record or operation. If a request includes an object identifier, such as an account or order ID, an attacker may try changing it and see whether the server returns someone else’s data. The same mistake can enable unauthorized changes, not just unauthorized reads.
OWASP’s API Security Project identifies APIs as a target because they expose application logic and sensitive data, including personally identifiable information. Its API1:2023 guidance says object-level authorization checks should be considered in every function that accesses a data source using an ID supplied by the user. That is why a perimeter firewall or successful login is not enough: the application must decide whether this specific caller may perform this specific action on this specific object.
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Which API failures create the greatest risk?
OWASP’s API Security Top 10:2023 is a useful checklist of failure classes, not a ranked measurement of which attack happens most often. It covers authorization, authentication, resource use, business logic, configuration, and API dependencies:
| Risk class | What can go wrong | Practical question |
|---|---|---|
| Broken Object Level Authorization (BOLA) | A caller changes or supplies an object ID and accesses or modifies an object they are not permitted to use. | Does every endpoint that reads or changes an identified object check the caller’s access to that object? |
| Broken Authentication | Weak or incorrectly implemented identity and session checks let an attacker impersonate a user or service. | Are credentials verified reliably, protected in transit and storage, and revoked or rotated when needed? |
| Broken Object Property Level Authorization | An endpoint exposes or accepts properties the caller should not be able to read or change, such as internal fields or privileged account settings. | Does the API return and accept only the properties authorized for this caller and operation? |
| Unrestricted Resource Consumption | Requests consume excessive compute, storage, bandwidth, or paid third-party resources, potentially causing service degradation or unexpected cost. | Are request size, frequency, concurrency, and expensive operations bounded? |
| Broken Function Level Authorization | A user can invoke an operation or administrative function beyond their role, even when access to individual records is checked. | Does the server authorize each function, not merely authenticate the caller or hide a button in the client? |
| Unrestricted Access to Sensitive Business Flows | Automated or abusive use of a legitimate workflow—such as account creation, booking, or purchasing—causes financial or operational harm. | Can the business detect and limit abusive patterns without blocking legitimate users? |
| Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF) | An API feature that fetches a supplied URL or other remote resource can be induced to make requests the attacker could not make directly. | Are outbound destinations constrained and sensitive internal services protected from server-initiated requests? |
| Security Misconfiguration | Unsafe defaults, excessive permissions, exposed diagnostics, or inconsistent settings create exploitable openings. | Are configuration and deployment settings reviewed and kept consistent across environments? |
| Improper Inventory Management | Unknown, obsolete, undocumented, or unsupported API versions remain reachable and outside normal oversight. | Can the organization identify every live API, its owner, version, exposure, and retirement plan? |
| Unsafe Consumption of APIs | Data or responses from a third-party or partner API are trusted without adequate validation, allowing unsafe content or behavior to affect the consuming system. | Are external API responses validated and treated as untrusted input? |
How to prevent someone from changing an ID and seeing another customer’s data
Do not rely on an identifier being hard to guess, on a client hiding records, or on a gateway recognizing a logged-in user. The API’s server-side logic must authorize access to the requested object every time it is read or changed.
- Identify the caller. Verify the user or service credential and establish the identity and relevant role or attributes for the request.
- Resolve the requested object. Treat IDs and other selectors from the request as untrusted input. Find the object within the scope the caller is allowed to access where possible, rather than assuming the supplied ID is legitimate.
- Check the relationship and action. Confirm that this caller may perform this exact operation on this exact object. A permission to view one record does not automatically grant permission to edit it, and access to one object does not imply access to a neighboring ID.
- Filter fields separately. Authorize which properties may be returned or changed. Avoid returning whole database records by default or mass-assigning request fields into sensitive objects.
- Test negative cases. Use two accounts with different access, then verify that substituting the second account’s object ID is denied for reads, updates, deletes, and related operations. Check that responses do not leak sensitive details when access fails.
These checks belong in shared server-side authorization logic where practical, but the security property must hold at every data access path. Test direct API calls as well as normal user-interface flows: a client interface can conceal a control without preventing a caller from sending the request.
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Why one API breach percentage is not a reliable answer
OWASP’s 2023 API Top 10 methodology records that its public call for data did not produce enough information for relevant statistical analysis. The Top 10 is forward-looking awareness guidance; it should not be read as a prevalence ranking or as a measured estimate of the share of API breaches caused by each category.
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OWASP’s 2025 A01: Broken Access Control data reports a 3.74% average incidence rate for mapped CWEs and 1,839,701 total occurrences in its contributed dataset. Those are general web-application figures for the A01 category, not an API-only breach rate, and they do not tell a company the probability that it will be breached. Use them with that scope intact rather than turning them into a claim about API incidents.
For an organization deciding what to fix, documented failure modes and its own inventory, authorization tests, logs, and incident patterns are more actionable than a universal percentage that the available data does not establish.
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Which API security controls should a company implement first?
NIST SP 800-228 treats API protection as a lifecycle problem, spanning pre-runtime controls and runtime protections. It identifies capabilities including authentication and authorization, request and response validation, rate limiting, circuit breaking, error handling, and logging and monitoring. A gateway or web application firewall (WAF) can help enforce shared policy, but neither replaces correct authorization inside the service.
- Establish ownership and an inventory. Record APIs, owners, purpose, data sensitivity, versions, environments, exposure, and dependencies. Include partner-facing and internal APIs, not just public endpoints. Identify stale versions and assign a retirement or remediation owner.
- Close authorization gaps. Enforce authentication plus object-, property-, and function-level authorization in the service. Make access decisions server-side and deny by default when permission cannot be established. Review service identities and privileges as well as human-user access.
- Protect credentials and sessions. Use credentials appropriate to the client and service, verify them consistently, store them securely, and rotate or revoke them when exposure or ownership changes. Avoid treating possession of a valid credential as permission to every API operation.
- Validate requests and responses. Check inputs against expected types, ranges, schemas, and business constraints. Limit returned fields to what the caller needs and is authorized to see. Validate responses from APIs the service consumes before using them.
- Set resource and abuse limits. Apply rate limits and reasonable request, payload, concurrency, and operation bounds. Use circuit breakers to contain cascading failures when a dependency or service is struggling. Tune limits to distinguish normal use from suspicious or costly patterns.
- Reduce configuration and error exposure. Review deployment settings, access policies, diagnostics, and version exposure. Return errors that help legitimate clients recover without disclosing secrets, stack traces, or unnecessary internal detail.
- Apply consistent edge policy. Use API gateways and WAFs where they fit to centralize policy such as authentication integration, traffic controls, and request filtering. Keep service-level checks for authorization and business rules that require application context.
- Instrument and rehearse response. Log auditable security-relevant events, protect log access and integrity, monitor API activity, route actionable alerts, and define who investigates them. Rehearse how to contain a compromised credential, abusive workflow, or exposed API version.
Build these controls into design and delivery as well as runtime. Design reviews and CI/CD checks can catch missing authorization paths, unsafe schemas, or exposed versions before release; runtime monitoring and enforcement can constrain abuse and surface attacks against APIs already in service.
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Detection requires useful telemetry, not simply a gateway being present. OWASP’s A09:2025 guidance states that attacks and breaches cannot be detected without logging and monitoring, and that alerting is important for a timely response. The operational task is to record the events needed to investigate abuse while protecting the records themselves.
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- Log meaningful events: authentication failures and unusual successes, authorization denials, sensitive data access, privileged actions, rate-limit events, validation failures, changes to API configuration, and errors involving dependencies.
- Include investigation context: capture timestamp, API and operation, outcome, relevant identity or service account, and a request or trace identifier. Avoid logging secrets, full credentials, or unnecessary personal data.
- Watch for behavioral changes: alert on unusual access volume, repeated attempts across object IDs, shifts in a client’s normal access pattern, bursts of sensitive actions, or resource use that threatens availability or cost limits.
- Make alerts actionable: assign an escalation path, define severity and response ownership, and periodically test whether alerts reach someone who can investigate and contain the activity.
- Protect and retain logs appropriately: restrict access, preserve integrity, and set retention to support incident investigation and organizational requirements.
Logs do not prevent a flaw, and alerts do not contain an incident by themselves. Pair monitoring with a response procedure that can revoke credentials, block abusive traffic, disable or constrain a vulnerable operation, and notify the service owner.
How to compare API security tools and services
No single product category covers every failure in the API Top 10. Compare a proposed control against your actual gaps and ask for evidence of what it sees, blocks, and leaves to application teams.
| Comparison axis | What to verify |
|---|---|
| Lifecycle coverage | Does it address design, CI/CD, runtime, or only one stage? How are findings carried from development into production operations? |
| Authorization depth | Can it reason about object, property, and function permissions in your application, or does it mainly provide identity, traffic, or schema controls? |
| Inventory discovery | Can it identify live and undocumented APIs, versions, owners, and exposed environments across the deployment model you use? |
| Validation and abuse protection | What request and response validation, rate limiting, bot or business-flow controls, and resource bounds are supported? Which require application-specific rules? |
| Observability | Can your team investigate alerts with useful context, integrate them with existing monitoring, and distinguish suspicious activity from expected traffic? |
| Deployment and integration | Where does the control run, what traffic or code must it access, and what is the integration and operational burden for each API team? |
| Coverage evidence | Can the provider or internal team demonstrate which APIs and risks are covered, what remains uncovered, and how effectiveness will be measured? |
Gateways and WAFs are common enforcement components, particularly for shared runtime policy, but they cannot independently guarantee that an application checks whether a caller owns a particular record or may change a particular field. Treat coverage as a combination of engineering controls, deployment policy, monitoring, and response rather than a feature checkbox.
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