Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

As the software world shifted toward microservices and distributed architectures, the volume and complexity of API traffic have skyrocketed. Unfortunately, so has the number of API-related breaches and cyber attacks. Last year, nearly 44% of all advanced bot traffic online targeted API endpoints, while traditional web applications received just 10% of the malicious traffic. It’s no surprise that 57% of organizations admit to having suffered API-related breaches in the past two years.

Often overlooked, identities are prime targets for bad actors. In December 2024, a compromised API key in the BeyondTrust Remote Support SaaS environment was enough to cause a privilege escalation attack. The year before, Microsoft hit the headlines as an SAS token leak exposed over 38TB of sensitive data. The good news is that simplifying user access and eliminating security risks from standing privileges has never been more achievable thanks to the right identity lifecycle management (ILM) tools.

Security breaches are increasingly expensive and harder to spot, extending beyond common attacks like phishing. Attackers are now targeting the least visible parts of your infrastructure: non-human identities (NHIs). NHIs outnumber human identities by 45:1 in cloud environments—these include service accounts, APIs, applications, and bots that interact with systems and access sensitive data.