Category: Indusface

[ This article was originally published here by Indusface.com ]

Data from a recent report revealed that bots take up two-thirds of internet traffic. However, not all bots are safe and well-intentioned. Research further suggests that of all the web traffic, nearly 40% is bad bot traffic, and around 25% is good bot traffic. Given how destructive bad bots are, it is essential to use a bot protection solution to detect bad bots, manage bot traffic, and mitigate bot threats. Read on to know more about bot protection solutions and how they help organizations.

The Bot Problem: Why is it Necessary to Mitigate Bot Threats? 

Bad bots harm your business in several ways, some of which are detailed below.

1. Leveraged in a Range of Attacks 

From phishing, spamming, ad frauds, data harvesting to DDoS attacks, account takeovers, and brute force attacks, bad bots are leveraged by attackers to orchestrate a wide range of attacks. These attacks could cause downtimes, make the website/ application unavailable to legitimate human traffic, enable illegitimate access to critical assets, and/or lead to the loss of sensitive information, among others. Further, bad bots are also used by attackers to illicitly snoop and scan websites for vulnerabilities to exploit.

2. Content Scraping That Negatively Impacts SEO

Scraper bots are often deployed by attackers and even competitors to extract copyrighted/ trademarked/ proprietary content from a website and duplicate it elsewhere. This is often done by competitors or adversaries looking to negatively impact your SEO rankings as duplicated content diminishes your site’s authority over that content. Content scraping is also used by attackers to orchestrate phishing attacks and scams. They create fake websites by duplicating scraped content to trick visitors and do their bidding.

3. Price Scraping

Competitors looking to undercut prices typically deploy scraper bots to scrape prices from e-commerce and other websites. Competitors, thus, gain an edge in the marketplace and win the SEO war on price. You will find lower conversions, SEO ranking drops, and unexplained downtimes caused by aggressive scrapers.

4. Skewed Analytics That Lead to Poor Marketing Decisions 

By leveraging botnets, attackers could orchestrate DDoS attacks to make your website unavailable to legitimate traffic while affecting your traffic metrics. Bad bots are also leveraged to create and abandon shopping carts on e-commerce sites, thereby, creating non-existent leads. Similarly, bad bots are leveraged by attackers/ competitors to commit click fraud, creating non-existent shoppers and driving up advertising costs. Such skewed metrics often lead to poor marketing decisions and a reduction in ROI from advertising and marketing.

5. Loss of Customer Trust and Confidence

Bad bots are used by attackers to spam the comments sections with malicious code/ provocative comments/ scathing reviews, inflate views, write false or biased content by creating fake social media accounts, write fake user reviews, and so on. Such activities lead to the loss of customer trust and confidence in your brand and drive customers away from your website.

Overall, bad bots cause revenue losses to organizations by negatively impacting the bottom line. Further, the attacks caused by bad bots bring massive financial losses, legal bills, penalties, and reputational damage. By mitigating bot threats, you save yourself millions of dollars.

Bot Protection Solution: Why it is Vital to Mitigate and Manage Bot Threats?

Bot protection solutions or bot management solutions enable organizations to effectively identify and manage bot traffic while mitigating threats. All this without affecting your legitimate and business-critical traffic.

1. Keep Your Website Protected  

Bot protection solutions offer round-the-clock protection against bad bots. They are automated and capable of identifying and blocking malicious/bad bots in real time. They can automatically detect bad bots and block them. This enables organizations to keep their bot risk to a minimum and proactively protect their website from a range of known and emerging threats.

2. Make Your Website Always Available to Business-Critical Traffic

The best bot management solutions like AppTrana are equipped with global threat intelligence and insights on past attacks, and they have self-learning abilities as well. This gives them the ability to intelligently decide the action to be taken based on the context. Such a solution will be able to decide whether to allow, block, challenge or flag a particular request/ user. This way, unwanted traffic is kept at bay without affecting business-critical traffic.

3. Optimize Business Intelligence and Analytics

By identifying and mitigating bot threats, the bot protection solutions help to ensure that business analytics and intelligence are not skewed. So, you will get the right picture of your visitors and the state of your marketing and advertising campaigns. You can, thus, focus your time and resources on real customers and on engaging & converting real leads.

4. Accelerate Site Performance

Bad bots consume excessive bandwidth and create excessive load on servers. This impacts your website’s performance. By mitigating bad bots, you can accelerate your site’s performance and keep downtimes at bay.

The Way Forward

Malicious bots are everywhere and are more sophisticated than ever. Only blocking bots is not an efficient and long-term solution to a growing threat. Instead, it is vital to have a proactive bot protection approach to move forward.

By choosing a managed, intelligent, and advanced bot mitigation solution like AppTrana, you can ensure multi-layered, real-time protection against all kinds of bad bots. It also offers visibility into the threats to block ongoing attacks.

The post Why Do You Need a Bot Protection Solution for Your Business? appeared first on Cybersecurity Insiders.

[ This article was originally published here by Indusface.com ]

Many of the businesses that already have revenue-generating web applications are starting an API-first program. Now, old monolith apps are being broken into microservices developed in elastic and flexible service-mesh architecture.

The common question most organizations grapple with is – how to enhance application security designed for web apps to APIs and API security?

Protecting APIs against modern cyber threats requires going beyond the traditional solutions. Web Application and API protection (WAAP), the next generation of Web Application Firewall (WAF) comes to the rescue.

What is WAAP? 

WAAP (Web Application and API Protection) is a set of cloud-based security services specially designed to protect web applications and APIs. This security tool is far more advanced than a WAF that mostly monitors OWASP application threats. This expanded WAF integrates, observes, and takes intuitive action when needed. With real-time logs and statistics, it can integrate well with the other applications the company uses.

WAAP Becomes a Modern-Day AppSec Essential- Why? 

APIs are not insecure by nature, but due to the complexity and quantity of API adoption, it is easy to have security gaps and cyber risks waiting to leap out. Without proper functions, security testing, authentication checks, and input validation, APIs can become a perfect target. Hackers just need one loophole for a successful exploit.

1. API Security Breaches are Piling Up

  • In addition, the IBM Security X-Force report highlighted that 2/3 of all cloud breach incidents are now involved in misconfigured APIs.
  • API has emerged as a major actor vector with many companies reporting API-related security breaches. For example, Pelton, a fitness company exposed three million customer data due to a flawed API, which allows access to a private account without proper authentication.
  • Venmo, USPS’ Corporate Database Exposure, Facebook’s Breaches, and JustDial are a few other companies that experienced API security attacks.

These growing threats drove the need for a new platform with API-specific security features outside the scope of traditional security management tools. This is simply an extension of the requirement for VLANs, firewalls, RASPs, and WAFs.

2. Traditional Security Solutions Are No Longer Enough

Enterprises must meet several requirements to maintain their web application and API protection levels. Unfortunately, the traditional security solutions that most enterprises usually deploy create problems rather than offering solutions.

  • False Negative Vulnerability Scanning:
    If you are scanning APIs with a general web application scanner, then you are most likely missing 8 out of the 10 API vulnerabilities. A vulnerability scanner, which was not designed to catch API vulnerabilities will result in false-negative reports. As a result of the lack of findings, they suggest that your APIs are secure. However, it is more likely that the scanner didn’t scan for any API weakness.
  • API Gateway Security Limit:
    The API gateway provides various security functionalities for authenticating API users, rate limiting, audit trail, and ensuring compliance. Though it offers basic API protections, leaves many opportunities for attackers. API gateway concentrates only on the front door of the API. The security can be compromised by fake and compromised credentials.
  • Signature-based Only Solutions Insufficient for Web API Security: 
    Signature-based approaches are based on the analysis of the previous attack. However, when a new attack happens, which does not match the signature, the tools won’t stop it. Further, the signatures and static rules can’t prevent business logic attacks as the traffic looks legitimate. Broken Object Level Authorization (BOLA), this business logic vulnerability occupies the number one position in the OWASP Top 10 API Threats list.
  • WAFs – Static Rules Falls Short:
    WAFs (Web Application Firewalls) prevent attacks by allowing only safe traffic through the web applications. A Web Application Firewall is an important part of AppSec but there are some limitations with its static rule-based protection. The continuous change in the modern web apps and APIs requires manual tuning as well as rule development – making manual administration a prerequisite.

Traditional WAFs that focus on the attacks originating from external traffic might leave the insider attacks undetected.

  • RASP (Runtime Application Self-Protection) – Patterns are Misleading:
    The visibility of RASP is limited when it needs to be engaged with microservices at different endpoints. Though it stops the attack against these endpoints, it can’t detect actions across the entire service at once. In addition, as it does not learn the business context, it may predict a valid use case as an attempt to attack and stop it.
  • Demands Inspection of Encrypted Traffic :
    While TLS encryption denies the ability of hackers to surveil the traffic, it makes the traffic content invisible to the firewall for inspection. It offers intruders a great way to hide anything they want to add to the stream using security technologies.

These situations make protecting web applications and APIs challenging. While protecting several legacy apps, the security solution should protect modern web applications and APIs.

Core Capabilities of Web Application and API Protection (WAAP) 

As firewalls and other security solutions are no longer enough to fulfill the API security compliance requirements, the way to address this situation is to adopt a consolidated platform called WAAP.

WAAP evolved as a product suite and provides comprehensive security solutions for monolithic and microservice-based apps as well as APIs. It ensures protection against known and zero-day attacks with an integrated WAF, anti-DDoS, bot management, and API protection.

WAAP: Core Capabilities :

  • Fully Managed WAF (Web Application Firewall)
    A fully managed, cloud-based WAF serves as the first line of defense for defending web applications and APIs. They supplement the signature-based protections offered by IPS and firewalls. By monitoring apps’ behaviors and usage and through deep inspections, the Web Application Firewall designs a baseline of normal app behaviors. Then, the WAF can trigger actions when anomalies arise in the cloud or the data center. A fully managed WAF solution can also ensure defenses against the OWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities,

DDoS attacks, malicious sources, and complex threats targeting web apps and APIs, including buffer overflow, SQL injection, file inclusion, XSS, cookie poisoning, and many others.

  • API Security
    Automated API protection shields API endpoints from exploitation. It comprises a wide range of functions like monitoring and logging, traffic management, and API versioning. Further API protection includes additional essential security features such as authorization and authentication, rate limiting, API key verification, and call rewriting. API security also includes dynamic attack signatures to detect threats targeting APIs.
  • Bot Mitigation and Management
    Malicious botnets are a key tool for initiating an attack against an API. Bot mitigation capabilities block malicious bot activity while allowing bots that support legitimate business needs like search engines or performance and health monitoring tools. With seamless visibility as well as control over bot traffic, it protects websites, web applications, and APIs from automated traffic.
  • DDoS Attack Protection
    Anti-DDoS solutions secure on-premise as well as cloud-based assets no matter where they’re hosted (Microsoft Azure, AWS, or Google Publish Cloud). WAAP ensures that its DDoS mitigation strategy is capable to detect and mitigate API-focused distributed denial of service attacks. It blocks traffic at the edge for seamless business continuity with no performance impact and guaranteed uptime.

Additional WAAP Capabilities

Other Common WAAP capabilities to protect web applications and APIs against a wide range of security attacks without involving a great deal of manual oversight and management include:

  • ML-Based Threat Detection
    Signature-based detection contributes to many false positives, WAAP employs ML-based threat detection to defend zero-day attacks with minimum false positives.
  • Real-Time Attack Analytics
    The Web application and API protection tool offers complete visibility with domain expertise and employs ML techniques to monitor all security events and reveal attack patterns.

Automation And Orchestration

In addition to the core capabilities, web application and API protection solutions offer automation and enable orchestration across the entire infrastructure. Manual rules creation and policy rewriting can’t keep up with the speed of innovation. WAAP approach automates the flow of security events and empowers incident response workflows. Moving to this unified solution delivers the operational advantages by automating rules’ updates. With built-in intelligence, the WAAP solution learns on its own to adapt to the dynamic threat landscape.

With WAAP, you can eliminate threats before they get in, keep hackers out of your system, and more. Secure your business and safeguard your reputation with a new WAAP solution!

The post What is WAAP? – A Quick Walk Through appeared first on Cybersecurity Insiders.

[ This article was originally published here by Indusface.com ]

Thinking about all the high-profile cyber threats that businesses face today can make you feel overwhelmed. The most devastating security breach incidents that made headlines, show the incidence of API abuse. Take Venmo, Panera, Equifax, WikiLeaks, and Uber’s hacks for example. With these incidents, it is clear that cybercriminals are becoming smarter, and many businesses are not focusing much on API security.

As our API-related development increases, so does the cybercriminals’ desire to take advantage of it – driving new evolutions in API security threats.

“By using APIs, companies may inadvertently open up the door to all of their corporate data,”

                                    -Chris Haddad, chief architect at Karux LLC.

Source: Techtarget

So, how can you avoid becoming an API hack headline? The best way to leverage the power of APIs without confronting insider threats and external attacks is by following these API security best practices:

API Security Best Practices for Web Apps  

  1. Implement A Zero Trust Philosophy  

When it comes to “What is API Security?”, many people would highlight API authentication, but API security is more about API threat prevention. Zero Trust is a security policy centered on the principle that companies should not trust anyone by default and instead must verify everything trying to access their systems.

Zero-Trust ideology should be applied to even authorized API endpoints, authenticated clients, as well as unauthenticated and unauthorized entities.

Critical factors to consider while implementing a zero-trust policy on your API include API Protocol Support, API Deep Request Inspection, Cloud-native Deployment Method, API Discovery – Up to date API Inventory, and Data leakage prevention.

  1. Identify API Vulnerabilities and Associated Risks

It is dangerous to ignore API vulnerabilities and risks. Many API vulnerabilities and errors can be caught in the initial stage; hence, fixing them becomes easy and quick.

With thorough API security testing, discover which parts of your API are vulnerable to the known threats. Refer to the OWASP’s Top 10 API Security Vulnerabilities list to make sure the biggest vulnerability categories are mitigated. Also, identify all the data and systems that get affected if a vulnerability is exploited and create an appropriate recovery plan to reduce the risks to an acceptable level. Assess the API endpoints before any code changes to make sure any data handling requirements and security are not compromised.

  1. Enforce Strong Authentication and Authorization

Though authentication and authorization play different roles, when implemented together, these two API best practices work as a powerful tool for API security. Authentication is necessary for securely verifying the user of the API and authorization is concerned with what data they have access to. API authentication allows to restrict or remove users who abuse the API. API authorization usually starts after the identity is confirmed through authentication and verifies if users or applications have permission to access the API.

API authentication and authorization serve the following purposes:

  • To authenticate calls to the API to legitimate users only
  • To track the requesters
  • Tracking API usage
  • Enabling different levels of permissions for different users
  • Blocking the requester who exceeds the rate limit
  1. Expose Only Limited Data

When we think of web API security best practices, we often think of blocking out malicious activity. It can also be helpful to limit the accidental exposure of sensitive information. As APIs are a developer’s tools, they often include passwords, keys, and other secret information that reveal too many details about the API endpoints. Make sure APIs only expose as much data as is needed to fulfill their operation. Further, enforce data access controls and the principle of least privilege at the API level, track data, and conceal if the response exposes any confidential data.

  1. Implement Rate Limits

DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) is the most common practice of attacking an API by overwhelming it with an unlimited API request. This attack affects the availability and performance of APIs.

Rate limiting, also known as API limiting is a process of enforcing a limit on how often an API is called (to ensure that an API remains available to legitimate requests). Beyond DDoS attack mitigation, it limits other abusive actions like aggressive polling, credential stuffing, and rapidly updating configurations. API rate limiting not only deals with fair usage of shared resources but also can be used to:

  • Implement different access levels on API– based services
  • Meter the API usage
  • Guarantee API performance
  • Ensure system availability
  1. Implement Web Application and API Protection (WAAP)

We recommend a Web Application and API Protection (WAAP) solution for business use cases where API calls are made from the web and mobile apps. These apps commonly have access to ample amounts of sensitive information and APIs in these channels are tough to defend. Common security tools like traditional firewall and API gateway are insufficient to prevent API attacks. WAAP solution is centered around four consolidated capabilities: DDoS protection, Web Application Firewall, Bot Management, and API protection.

Source: Indusface

It employs a fully managed and risk-based application security approach by monitoring traffic to detect abnormal activities and malicious traffic across all four-vectors. With the data collected across all the applications, it assesses risks and updates the mitigation strategies to enhance cyber defense in real-time. WAAPs also aid to reduce operational complexity by reducing the number of parameters that need to be managed, streamlining security rulesets, and automatically suggesting rules with its AI capabilities. While WAF protects against OWASP top 10 attacks and API gateway defends against standard attacks, AI-enabled behavioral analysis of WAAP ensures the defense against automated and more sophisticated attacks.

Conclusion

As APIs become a strategic necessity to offer your business the speed and agility needed to succeed, your ultimate goal should be defending them from evolving attacks. These API security best practices for web applications may not be a fool proof strategy in enhancing API security but can go a long way in making your API’s protection tough to penetrate.

The post Top 6 API Security Best Practices for 2022 appeared first on Cybersecurity Insiders.