How to Improve Your API Security Posture

 

APIs, more formally known as application programming interfaces, empower apps and microservices to communicate and share data. However, this level of connectivity doesn't come without major risks. Hackers can exploit vulnerabilities in APIs to gain unauthorized access to sensitive data or even take control of the entire system. Therefore, it's essential to have a robust API security posture to protect your organization from potential threats.

What is API posture management?#

API posture management refers to the process of monitoring and managing the security posture of your APIs. It involves identifying potential vulnerabilities and misconfigurations that could be exploited by attackers, and taking the necessary steps to remediate them. Posture management also helps organizations classify sensitive data and ensure that it's compliant with the leading data compliance regulations such as GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI DSS.

As mentioned above, APIs are a popular target for attackers because they often provide direct access to sensitive data and systems. By implementing an API posture management tool, organizations can proactively identify and remediate potential security issues before they're exploited.

You can download a free copy of the Definitive Guide to API Posture Management to learn more.

How does API posture management work?#

API posture management involves several key steps:

1. Discovery: The first step is to identify all APIs in use within an organization. This can be done using automated tools or through manual inventory.
2. Assessment: Once APIs have been identified, they need to be assessed for potential vulnerabilities and misconfigurations. This can be done using tools that scan APIs for known vulnerabilities or by conducting manual penetration testing.
3. Remediation: Any vulnerabilities or misconfigurations that are identified need to be remediated. This may involve applying patches, reconfiguring APIs, or implementing additional security controls.
4. Monitoring: Finally, APIs need to be continuously monitored to ensure that they remain secure. This may involve implementing intrusion detection systems, log analysis, or other monitoring tools.

How to improve your API security posture#

Here are some best practices that can help improve your API security posture:

1. Use Secure Authentication and Authorization Mechanisms#

Authentication and authorization mechanisms are essential components of API security. They help ensure that only authorized users can access the API and perform specific actions. It is essential to use secure authentication and authorization mechanisms, such as OAuth 2.0 or OpenID Connect, to protect your APIs from unauthorized access.

2. Implement Role-Based Access Control#

Role-based access control (RBAC) is a security model that restricts access to resources based on the user's role. RBAC can help prevent unauthorized access to sensitive data by limiting access to only those users who need it to perform their job functions.

3. Use SSL/TLS Encryption#

SSL/TLS encryption is a security protocol that encrypts data transmitted between the client and the server. It helps prevent eavesdropping and ensures that data is transmitted securely. It is essential to use SSL/TLS encryption to protect your APIs from man-in-the-middle attacks.

4. Implement Rate Limiting#

Rate limiting is a technique that restricts the number of API requests that can be made within a specific time frame. It can help prevent API abuse and ensure that the API is available to all users. Implementing rate limiting can also help protect your APIs from denial-of-service (DoS) attacks.

5. Monitor and Log API Activity#

Monitoring and logging API activity can help detect suspicious activity and potential security breaches. It is essential to monitor API activity in real-time and log all API requests and responses. This can help identify security incidents and enable you to take appropriate action.

6. Conduct Regular API Security Audits#

Regular API security audits can help identify vulnerabilities and misconfigurations that may have been missed during the initial implementation. It is essential to conduct regular security audits to ensure that your APIs are secure and compliant with industry standards.

Conclusion#

APIs are a critical component of modern software development. However, with the increasing use of APIs, the risk of security breaches has also increased. Implementing API posture management can help improve your API security posture and protect your organization from potential threats. By following the best practices outlined in this article, you can reduce the risk of security breaches and ensure that your APIs are secure and compliant with industry standards.

This Definitive Guide focuses on the key requirements for API Security Posture Management — click here to download now

Guardz Launches AI-Powered Multilayered Phishing Protection To Secure SMEs

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SHARES

ShareTwee[TEL AVIV, Israel, June 8, 2023] – Guardz, the cybersecurity company securing and insuring SMEs, today announced a new AI-powered Multilayered Phishing Protection solution to help small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and managed service providers (MSPs) prevent phishing attacks before their security is compromised. The hassle-free and cost effective solution uses AI to provide small businesses and the MSPs that support them with automatic detection and remediation capabilities to protect against phishing attacks – the number one threat they face. By combining email security, web browsing protection, perimeter posture, and awareness culture in one native solution, businesses can now efficiently safeguard against phishing threats, bolstering resilience and future-proofing their systNinety percent of all cyber attacks are initiated with phishing, which relies on social engineering to prey on human nature. Cybercriminals attempt to obtain sensitive information such as usernames, passwords, and credit card details by tricking recipients clicking on malicious links or providing personal information, which can then be used for identity theft, ransomware attacks, or other malicious activities. These attacks can result in data breaches, financial loss, and reputational damage to small businesses and even compromise the security of a business’s entire network, leading to the exposure of further confidential information.

Guardz’s new Multilayered Phishing Protection: continuously scans for all inbound traffic with its advanced anti-phishing email protection solution; initiates detection through AI-powered anti-phishing and anti-malware engines; removes risky emails from users’ inboxes and automatically sends them to quarantine; monitors internet browsing to detect potential phishing attempts and delivers real-time alerts to system admins to enable timely responses; and  provides ongoing, active cyber awareness training and tailored phishing simulations for employees, fostering a culture of caution and vigilance. Perhaps most importantly when dealing with phishing, the Guardz solution empowers every employee to behave in ways that support and strengthen the business’s cybersecurity posture.

“The proliferation of phishing attack as a service (AaaS) tools sold on the dark web is putting the SME ecosystem increasingly at risk. Our new AI-powered phishing protection solution provides SMEs and MSPs with a holistic and accessible solution to prevent the success of phishing attacks,” said Dor Eisner, CEO and Co-Founder of Guardz. “This is a significant addition to Guardz’s holistic cyber security offering for small businesses, ensuring that they can react to cyber risks in real time with swift remediations, but also be protected by cyber insurance for complete peace of mind – a true secure and insure approach.”

The Multilayered Phishing Protection enables MSPs to provide their SME customers complete protection across all potential phishing attack vectors. It does so by automatically scanning the perimeter posture, inbound email traffic and internet browsing, and by providing ongoing, tailored cyber awareness training and simulation for employees. The platform automatically verifies emails for authentication protocols including Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC), Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and checks for malicious forwarding rules.

NMap New Version 7.70 Released With Hundred of New OS And Service Fingerprints, 9 New NSE Scripts

NMap New Version 7.70 Released With Hundred of New OS And Service Fingerprints

Nmap unfastened protection Scanner, Port Scanner, & network Exploration device. down load open source software for Linux, home windows, UNIX, FreeBSD, and so forth.



It consists of hundreds of latest OS and carrier fingerprints, nine new NSE scripts (for a total of 588), a miles-advanced model of our Npcap windows packet taking pictures library/motive force, and service detection improvements to make -sV quicker and greater accurate. 



and people are just a few of the dozens of improvements defined below.


Nmap 7.70 source code and binary programs for Linux, windows, and Mac are to be had for free



in case you locate any bugs in this launch, please let us understand on the Nmap Dev listing or trojan horse tracker as described at https://nmap.org/e-book/man-insects.html.



here is the entire listing of great changes in NMAP:


• [Windows] We made a ton of enhancements to our Npcap windows packet capturing library (https://nmap.org/npcap/) for greater performance and stability, as well as smoother installer and better 802.eleven uncooked framecapturing help. Nmap 7.70 updates the bundled Npcap from model zero.93 to zero.ninety nine-r2, along with a majority of these modifications from the remaining seven Npcap releases:

https://nmap.org/npcap/changelog



• included all of your service/model detection fingerprints submitted from March 2017 to August 2017 (728 of them). The signature count number went up 1.02% to eleven,672, such as 26 new softmatches.  We now stumble on 1224 protocols from filenet-pch, lscp, and netassistant to sharp-faraway, urbackup, and watchguard.  we will try and integrate the ultimate submissions in the subsequent launch.



• integrated all your IPv4 OS fingerprint submissions from September 2016 to August 2017 (667 of them). brought 298 fingerprints, bringing the brand new general to five,652. Additions include iOS 11, macOS Sierra, Linux four.14, Android 7, and greater.



• incorporated all 33 of your IPv6 OS fingerprint submissions from September 2016 to August 2017. New groups for OpenBSD 6.zero and FreeBSD eleven.0 were added, as well as bolstered businesses for Linux and OS X.



• added the --solve-all choice to solve and experiment all IP addresses of a bunch.  This basically replaces the resolveall NSE script. [Daniel Miller]



• [NSE][SECURITY] Nmap developer nnposter found a protection flaw (directory traversal vulnerability) inside the way the non-default http-fetch script sanitized URLs. If a consumer manualy ran this NSE script in opposition to a malicious internet server, the server should probably (relying on NSE arguments used) cause documents to be stored outdoor the supposed destination directory. present documents could not be overwritten.  We fixed http-fetch, audited our different scripts to make certain they didn't make this mistake, and updated the httpspider library API to protect towards this through default. [nnposter, Daniel Miller]



• [NSE] introduced 9 NSE scripts, from eight authors, bringing the whole as much as 588! they may be all indexed at https://nmap.org/nsedoc/, and the summaries are underneath:



   - deluge-rpc-brute performs brute-force credential checking out towards

   Deluge BitTorrent RPC offerings, using the brand new zlib library. [Claudiu Perta]

   - hostmap-crtsh lists subdomains by using querying Google's certificate

   Transparency logs. [Paulino Calderon]

   - [GH#892] http-bigip-cookie decodes unencrypted F5 big-IP cookies and

   reports returned the IP cope with and port of the actual server in the back of the

   load-balancer. [Seth Jackson]

   - http-jsonp-detection attempts to discover JSONP endpoints in net

   servers. JSONP endpoints may be used to pass equal-foundation coverage

   regulations in web browsers. [Vinamra Bhatia]

   - http-trane-data obtains records from Trane Tracer SC controllers

   and connected HVAC devices. [Pedro Joaquin]

   - [GH#609] nbd-info makes use of the new nbd.lua library to question community Block

   devices for protocol and record export information. [Mak Kolybabi]

   - rsa-vuln-roca exams for RSA keys generated via Infineon TPMs

   vulnerable to return Of Coppersmith attack (ROCA) (CVE-2017-15361). tests

   SSH and TLS offerings. [Daniel Miller]

   - [GH#987] smb-enum-offerings retrieves the listing of offerings jogging on a

   remote windows device. current windows systems requires a privileged area

   account for you to list the offerings. [Rewanth Cool]

   - tls-alpn checks TLS servers for utility Layer Protocol Negotiation

   (ALPN) aid and reviews supported protocols. ALPN in large part replaces NPN,

   which tls-nextprotoneg was written for. [Daniel Miller]



• [GH#978] fixed Nsock on home windows giving errors while deciding on on STDIN.

This turned into inflicting Ncat 7.60 in connect mode to stop with errors: libnsock select_loop(): nsock_loop mistakes 10038: An operation turned into attempted on something that is not a socket.  [nnposter]



• [Ncat][GH#197][GH#1049] fix --ssl connections from losing on renegotiation, the same trouble that was partly fixed for server mode in [GH#773]. mentioned on home windows with -e through pkreuzt and vinod272. [Daniel

Miller]



• [NSE][GH#1062][GH#1149] some adjustments to brute.lua to higher handle misbehaving or rate-restricting services. most importantly, brute.killstagnated now defaults to true. way to xp3s and Adamtimtim for reporing infinite loops and presenting adjustments.



• [NSE] VNC scripts now guide Apple far off laptop authentication (auth kind 30) [Daniel Miller]



• [NSE][GH#1111] restoration a script crash in ftp.lua when PASV connection timed out. [Aniket Pandey]

• [NSE][GH#1114] update bitcoin-getaddr to receive more than one response message, for the reason that first message commonly most effective has one deal with in it. [h43z]



• [Ncat][GH#1139] Ncat now selects the appropriate default port for a given proxy kind. [Pavel Zhukov]



• [NSE] memcached-info can now acquire records from the UDP memcached carrier similarly to the TCP carrier. The UDP carrier is frequently used as a DDoS reflector and amplifier. [Daniel Miller]



• [NSE][GH#1129] changed url.absolute() behavior with recognize to dot and dot-dot course segments to conform with RFC 3986, phase five.2. [nnposter]



• eliminated deprecated and undocumented aliases for numerous lengthy alternatives that used underscores instead of hyphens, which includes --max_retries. [Daniel Miller]



• advanced service experiment's remedy of gentle matches in  approaches. to start with, any probes that could bring about a complete healthy with the gentle matched carrier will now be despatched, regardless of rarity. This improves the chances of matching uncommon offerings on non-standard ports.  2d, probes at the moment are skipped if they do not incorporate any signatures for the gentle matched provider.



Perviously the probes could still be run as long as the goal port range matched the probe's specification.  collectively, those changes have to make service/model detection quicker and extra accurate.  For greater information on how it works, see https://nmap.org/book/vscan.html. [Daniel Miller]



• --model-all now turns off the soft fit optimization, ensuring that each one probes virtually are despatched, despite the fact that there aren't any current fit lines for the softmatched provider. this is slower, but gives the maximum comprehensive effects and produces higher fingerprints for submission.

[Daniel Miller]



• [NSE][GH#1083] New set of Telnet softmatches for version detection based totally on Telnet DO/do not alternatives supplied, protecting a huge variety of devices and working structures. [D Roberson]



• [GH#1112] Resolved crash possibilities resulting from surprising libpcap version string format. [Gisle Vanem, nnposter]



• [NSE][GH#1090] restore false positives in rexec-brute with the aid of checking responses for indicators of login failure. [Daniel Miller]



• [NSE][GH#1099] fix http-fetch to preserve downloaded documents in separate vacation spot directories. [Aniket Pandey]



• [NSE] introduced new fingerprints to http-default-money owed:

+ Hikvision DS-XXX community digicam and NUOO DVR [Paulino Calderon]

+ [GH#1074] ActiveMQ, Purestorage, and Axis network Cameras [Rob

Fitzpatrick, Paulino Calderon]



• brought a new provider detection fit for WatchGuard Authentication Gateway. [Paulino Calderon]



• [NSE][GH#1038][GH#1037] Script qscan become now not looking at interpacket delays

(parameter qscan.postpone). [nnposter]



• [NSE][GH#1046] Script http-headers now fails nicely if the goal does not return a valid HTTP reaction. [spacewander]



• [Ncat][Nsock][GH#972] eliminate RC4 from the listing of TLS ciphers used by default, according with RFC 7465. [Codarren Velvindron]



• [NSE][GH#1022] restore a false fine circumstance in ipmi-cipher-0 resulting from now not checking the error code in responses. Implementations which go back

an mistakes are not susceptible. [Juho Jokelainen]



• [NSE][GH#958]  new libraries for NSE.

   - idna - aid for internationalized domains in programs

   (IDNA)

   - punycode (a switch encoding syntax used in IDNA) [Rewanth Cool]



• [NSE] New fingerprints for http-enum:

   - [GH#954] Telerik UI CVE-2017-9248 [Harrison Neal]

   - [GH#767] Many WordPress version detections [Rewanth Cool]



• [GH#981][GH#984][GH#996][GH#975] fixed Ncat proxy authentication troubles [nnposter]:



   - Usernames and/or passwords could not be empty

   - Passwords couldn't contain colons

   - SOCKS5 authentication was now not well documented

   - SOCKS5 authentication had a memory leak



• [GH#1009][GH#1013] Fixes to autoconf header documents to permit autoreconf to be run. [Lukas Schwaighofer]



• [GH#977] stepped forward DNS service model detection coverage and consistency by way of the use of data from a undertaking Sonar internet huge survey. Numerouse false positives were eliminated and reliable softmatches added. fit strains for version.bind responses were additionally conslidated the usage of the approach underneath.

[Tom Sellers]



• [GH#977] modified version probe fallbacks in order to paintings pass protocol (TCP/UDP). This permits consolidating in shape lines for services wherein the responses on TCP and UDP are similar. [Tom Sellers]



• [NSE][GH#532] brought the zlib library for NSE so scripts can easily deal with compression. This paintings started at some stage in GSOC 2014, so we're mainly pleased to ultimately integrate it! [Claudiu Perta, Daniel Miller]



• [NSE][GH#1004] constant handling of brute.retries variable. It was being treated because the number of tries, no longer retries, and a fee of zero would result in endless retries. instead, it's miles now the variety of retries, defaulting to two (three general attempts), with out a alternative for infinite retries.



• [NSE] http-devframework-fingerprints.lua supports Jenkins server detection and returns more records when Jenkins is detected [Vinamra Bhatia]



• [GH#926] The rarity stage of MS sq.'s carrier detection probe turned into reduced. Now we will discover MS square in abnormal ports with out increasing version intensity. [Paulino Calderon]



• [GH#957] restore reporting of zlib and libssh2 variations in "nmap --version". We were continually reporting the model wide variety of the included supply, even if a distinct model turned into certainly linked. [Pavel Zhukov]



• upload a brand new helper function for nmap-carrier-probes in shape traces: $I(1,">") will unpack an unsigned big-endian integer value up to 8 bytes wide from capture 1. the second option may be "<" for little-endian. [Daniel Miller]



experience this new launch and please do allow us to know if you find any troubles!



download hyperlink: https://nmap.org/download.html