Shadow APIs: What are the Risks and How to Prevent?

Quick Summary: Shadow APIs can pose significant security challenges for your organization because they are not managed or controlled by your IT team. They can have critical vulnerabilities that attackers can exploit to access sensitive data. Learn more about them in this article with associated risks and tips to prevent them. Keep reading to get useful information to enhance your security posture.

Undoubtedly, APIs are the foundation of modern applications. They facilitate seamless communication between disparate systems or applications. Therefore, organizations use them extensively to streamline operations. They use dozens or even thousands of APIs in reality.

However, managing these APIs is necessary to avoid the risks of shadow APIs. They are undocumented APIs that may be operating in your digital landscape without your knowledge. Attackers are always on the hunt for such APIs to exploit them for their malicious purposes.

In fact, more than 30% of cyberattacks target shadow APIs, which highlights the potential threat. Moreover, you need a comprehensive approach to protect your digital assets from these threats. Identifying and resolving the risks related to shadow APIs is one important step in this approach.

Additionally, continuous API security testing is also useful to discover and mitigate hidden loopholes that can allow attackers to breach your system’s security. The combined approach will yield great results, helping you defend your assets from attackers.

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What Actually Do Shadow APIs Mean?

In simple terms, a shadow API is one that is active in an organization’s digital environment but is not managed. Just imagine a background service running on your computer that is neither visible nor managed by you.

Similarly, shadow APIs are running in your digital environment, but they are not even officially documented. These APIs lack monitoring and your IT team’s control, which makes them a potential threat vector to cyberattacks.

They widen your attack surface. Hence, identifying these APIs is necessary to manage them effectively that will help ensure a stronger security posture. Now, you may wonder - why do these APIs reside in your digital ecosystem in the first place?

Well, these APIs could be remnants of previous software, created to test new updates or features, built to facilitate internal operations, created by developers to complete the project, or there might be other reasons for their creation.

Risks of Shadow APIs

It’s not hard to imagine the consequences of an API that is active but not managed and governed by you. The potential weaknesses in these APIs can expose critical information about your IT environment, enabling attackers to breach its security. So, these APIs have many kinds of risks as mentioned below.

Cybersecurity Risks

An obvious risk of shadow APIs is associated with cybersecurity. Since these APIs run outside of an organization’s monitoring scope, they lack sufficient security measures. As a result, there could be vulnerabilities that can open doors to cyberattacks like SQL injection, Cross-Site Scripting, and remote file inclusion.

It is no surprise that an API running in disguise could have critical security flaws that an attacker can exploit to intrude into your private network and wreak havoc. For example, if a shadow API lacks proper input validation and sanitization, an attacker can use commands/SQL queries as input for intrusion.

The attacker can gain access to sensitive information after successful intrusion. Plus, there can be more devasting consequences for your organization if shadow APIs are involved in critical business processes.

Privacy and Compliance Risks

Unmet security compliance is another risk with shadow APIs that leads to penalties and legal actions, especially when there is a data breach. Since these APIs execute beyond the security scope of your organization, they possibly don’t align with your organization’s standards for security compliance.

In addition, these APIs might not adhere to your organization's data privacy policy. It results in unauthorized access, sensitive data exposures, and other types of data-related risks. Your organization will also suffer drastic reputational damage and penalties in the case of a data breach.

Operational Risks

Shadow APIs may not adhere to the operational guidelines and standards of an organization because they run without the approval and knowledge of the IT team. Consequently, these APIs are prone to instability and performance issues that could disrupt operations.

Due to a lack of maintenance and improvements, these APIs could be running on outdated technologies or components that will result in compatibility issues. You can simply think of a shadow API with a poor design. Such an API will consume a lot of system resources, slowing down the operations.

Role of API Discovery to Detect Shadow APIs

API discovery is a crucial process in identifying shadow APIs. This process helps discover and catalog all APIs used in your organization, whether external or internal. There are many automated API discovery tools to simplify the process, which saves time and eliminates the need for manual processes.

This process not only involves identifying and inventorying the APIs but also includes documenting and understanding them. In large organizations with thousands of APIs, discovering them is necessary to make proper API inventory. It helps in API management and mitigates potential cybersecurity risks.

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Shadow API vs Zombie API: An Overview

Shadow APIs are active but not managed by an organization’s IT team. So, these are APIs that are operational without an organization’s knowledge and control. Since they are running surreptitiously without your knowledge, these APIs pose significant security risks.

Does Zombie APIs create a scary image in your mind? They should. While they ain’t going to attack you or eat your brain, they are as dangerous for your data as actual zombies, you know. To be precise, these are outdated or unused APIs and are no longer operational and managed by your IT team.

While Zombie APIs are not in use, they are still lying in your systems, which could serve as an entry point for an attacker. Plus, they are not being updated and maintained, resulting in hidden loopholes.

Tips to Discover and Prevent Shadow APIs

There are many significant security risks associated with shadow APIs. Protecting your organization from these risks is pivotal to defending your digital landscape from cybersecurity threats. Although you can leverage API security best practices to prevent cybersecurity risks, vulnerable APIs hidden in your digital ecosystem will always be a potential threat vector.

As the saying goes - “prevention is better than cure,” you must apply this philosophy to your security approach, too. So, preventing shadow APIs is the best defense against these threats. The following prevention tips will help you mitigate the risks associated with these APIs.

Regular Auditing

Since organizations use a lot of APIs, chances are one or more of them might be operating covertly. Therefore, regular API auditing is important to review all APIs and document them. It helps create an API inventory for seamless governance and monitoring.

With auditing, you can find different APIs running within your IT environment, their dependencies, applications using them, and more. Track API usage to discover any changes in the usage pattern. It will indicate the possibility of shadow APIs. You can also leverage automated tools to discover APIs and save time.

Ensure API Governance Policy

Defining and implementing a governance policy is one of the most effective ways to prevent shadow APIs. You must be wondering how it helps. Let’s take an analogy. How can an examiner avoid chaos and manage students in an examination hall?

Well, ensuring discipline and proper seating arrangements can help manage the students. Similarly, managing a large number of APIs can be chaotic in the absence of a governance policy. This policy defines guidelines or rules for API creation and usage.

Use API Gateways

It is like an entry point through which all API requests pass. So, you can seamlessly manage and control the use of APIs. Another advantage of using API gateways is that all API requests are collectively authorized and authenticated prior to granting access to the system.

It reduces the risks of API in shadow and the potential of data breaches. You can further strengthen API gateway security to minimize the possibility of security breaches.

Reviewing Logs

Checking and analyzing real-time application logs helps discover shadow APIs. With these logs, you can get a lot of information about API metrics like newly created endpoints, response data, visibility into API usage, and more.

However, you should ensure that the logging tool you are using is configured properly to avoid any loophole in this aspect.

Traffic Monitoring

There are many signs of the presence of shadow APIs and checking network traffic can give promising clues. Any unaccounted network traffic is a good sign of them. Besides, a spike in calls to a specific API endpoint is also a sign of these APIs.

Monitoring network traffic will help you detect anomalies that could indicate the existence of shadow APIs, and you can take the right measures to protect against potential threats.

Regular Security Audits

Regular security audits are essential to discover any loopholes or weaknesses in your organization’s API landscape. Perform API vulnerability scanning to identify weaknesses that can cause significant cybersecurity threats.

By leveraging an advanced vulnerability scanner, you can identify the possible entry points of shadow APIs. It helps ensure a robust security posture for APIs.

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The Bottom Line

To summarize, shadow APIs are a critical security challenge for your organization. However, you can keep them in check with the right process, tools, and strategy. You can spot these sneaky APIs by monitoring the network, checking logs, and API discovery. Here, you can benefit from ZeroThreat, which offers API discovery to detect all APIs.

Besides, it is a powerful DAST tool that evaluates web apps and APIs to identify critical vulnerabilities with high precision. With ZeroThreat, you can thoroughly scan your APIs, be it internal or external, to detect high-risk vulnerabilities like OWASP API Risks.

It offers 5X scanning speed and accurate results with zero false positives. You can try it for free and check all the benefits it offers.