Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

The latest Salt Security State of API Security Report is out now, and we’re thrilled to give a little sneak peek of its contents. As we have done in previous years, the State of API Security Report is assembled from survey responses and empirical data from Salt customers. This report includes the special addition of the “in the wild” API vulnerability research, much like last year’s report did, to give deeper insight into API concerns in real-world situations.

In today's digital landscape, organizations face constantly evolving threats, and modern applications are built on APIs, making robust API security a top priority. Salt Security, a trailblazer in AI-powered API security, is at the forefront of addressing this challenge with our innovative platform. The recent introduction of advanced LLM-driven attacker insights further solidifies Salt's position as a leader in API security solutions.

APIs are crucial for modern digital businesses because they allow different software systems to communicate and exchange data seamlessly and they are foundational to how modern applications are built. However, they are also vulnerable to cyberattacks because they are widely used. To address this growing threat, organizations are increasingly turning to API protection solutions to protect their valuable data and ensure uninterrupted business operations.

As you may have seen in the news, a hacker stole 49 million customer records from Dell. The attack wasn’t novel or sophisticated. Instead, the attacker used a business logic flaw and an API to scrape 49 million records from Dell. How did they do it? Here is the attack flow. The attacker registered for an account within the Dell ecosystem to be a reseller/partner. They weren’t going to be. But Dell didn’t perform any checks, and within 48 hours, the attacker had a valid account.

GenAI has the promise to transform companies, and introduce a lot of security risk. One of the main benefits of GenAI relates to the modernization of apps. Most companies are going through some type of app modernization. They are responding to the market by delivering better and better experiences to their customers. This is largely done through the experience people have with their apps. This ranges from banking to healthcare to travel and everywhere in between.

OAuth is an important part of modern authorization frameworks, granting access to resources across different applications easily. However, vulnerabilities in OAuth implementations can create significant security risks. Following research released by Salt labs that uncovered critical vulnerabilities in the world's most popular authorization mechanism, Salt has released a multi-layered protection package to detect attempts to exploit OAuth and proactively fix the vulnerabilities.

Going to a vendor's Knowledge Base (KB) is often the first place practitioners go to get the product deployed or troubleshoot issues. Even with advanced search tools, historically, KBs have been challenging to find relevant content quickly, and navigating a KB can be frustrating. At Salt Security, not only do we want to make your job of securing APIs easier, but we also want to make getting the guidance you need easier, friendlier and more efficient.

Salt Labs researchers identified generative AI ecosystems as a new interesting attack vector. vulnerabilities found during this research on ChatGPT ecosystem could have granted access to accounts of users, including GitHub repositories, including 0-click attacks.

Securing organizations against today’s most advanced threats continues to be challenging, with APIs (Application Programming Interfaces)playing an increasingly central and vulnerable role, especially as digital transformation marches on. The NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 (CSF) release underscores the urgency of addressing evolving threats and now emphasizes the importance of governance in Cybersecurity.