API Security for Government and Public Sector
Are Governments a Primary Target?
As governments continue their digital transformation push, it brings both incredible opportunities and challenges. Applications can be built rapidly using APIs as the connective tissue that stitches application components together. However, this can increase application complexity, enabling cybercriminals to discover critical vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and sensitive data exposure within mission-critical applications. This can be especially serious when government agencies share sensitive data over managed, unmanaged, and shadow APIs. This can make them a primary target for cybercriminals.
As governments continue their digital transformation push, it brings both incredible opportunities and challenges. Applications can be built rapidly using APIs as the connective tissue that stitches application components together. However, this can increase application complexity, enabling cybercriminals to discover critical vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and sensitive data exposure within mission-critical applications. This can be especially serious when government agencies share sensitive data over managed, unmanaged, and shadow APIs. This can make them a primary target for cybercriminals.
By the Numbers
API Protection for Government and Public Sector
Threat actors continue to target government agencies. Cequence solves critical security use cases that are a top concern for government agencies through the Cequence Unified Application Protection solution.
Fraud Prevention
Cybercriminals look for ways to gain unauthorized access to API applications and commit fraud. This can impact users’ confidence in using government API applications and storing their personal information online. Government agencies need to accurately detect and block fraudulent activity with very low false positives, ensuring that fraud never compromises stored government and user data.
Zero-Trust API Security
Government agencies require the highest level of security. In order to achieve zero trust, government agencies must ensure that every user only has access to the data that they are entitled to access. Least privilege restricts users to only access data they are authorized for within an API application, keeping your sensitive data safe.
Privacy and PII
Government agencies carry a lot of personally identifiable information (PII) that needs to be protected at all costs. Exploiting API vulnerabilities can allow attackers to access internal portals, remotely take over user accounts and access personal user information. Detecting and remediating sensitive data exposure can ensure that user privacy and PII is always protected against malicious actors seeking to compromise sensitive data.
Cost Savings
The cloud is expensive. A high volume automated ATO or volumetric attack against an API without any resource or rate limiting (OWASP API#4) protection can cause cloud costs to skyrocket. The accurate detection and blocking of automated attacks can ensure that a government agency’s API applications are never overwhelmed by attacks, enabling users to continue to have uninterrupted access while saving on infrastructure costs.
Limitations of Traditional Defenses
Limitations of Traditional Defenses Today’s security teams simply lack the visibility and defense capabilities they need to protect the ever-growing risk from APIs and other application connections. Many have adopted a belief that compliance with PCI or SOC 2 guidelines combined with a shift-left, DevOps mentality supported by existing security technologies is sufficient to protect APIs. The problem with these strategies is that they don’t have a way to “know the unknown”, meaning they aren’t able to look for all APIs and API vulnerabilities without knowing where to look. Even if all APIs are discovered and “known”, attackers can still leverage seemingly legitimate transactions in an attempt to steal data or commit fraud. Traditional approaches that WAFs or API Gateways depend on easily evadable detection, lack the real-time ability to discern good from bad API activity and are reliant on static, least common denominator protection spread across multiple technology components.
The Journey to Unified Application Protection
Cequence Security believes in taking a holistic approach to defending against API-related data risk with a market-defining Unified Application Protection solution that goes beyond API security approaches that may focus solely on one aspect of the API protection journey. Achieving true peace of mind for comprehensive API attack protection means traveling through six distinct steps associated with the Unified Application Protection solution:
Discovery: Viewing an organization’s API attack surface from a threat actor perspective to know the unknown.
Inventory: Performing a comprehensive multi-cloud API inventory, including all existing APIs and connections.
Testing: Integrating API protection into development, which shifts API security left within the organization, so risky code doesn’t go live.
Compliance: Keeping APIs in compliance with specifications, standards and regulations such as OWASP and ensuring ongoing API governance.
Detection: Continuous scanning for threats, including subtle business logic abuse, fraud, and automated malicious activity from bots.
Prevention: Employing countermeasures such as alerts, real-time blocking, deception, without the need for added third-party data security tools.
Unified Application Protection is different from fragmented or incomplete API security offerings because it’s a methodology designed to account for multiple types of risk, across every phase of the API protection lifecycle.
Why Cequence?
With the Cequence Unified Application Protection solution, customers can continue to reap the competitive and business advantages of ubiquitous API connectivity. The Cequence solution results in attack futility, failure, and fatigue for even the most relentless of attackers. It significantly improves visibility and protection while reducing cost, minimizing fraud, business abuse, data losses and non-compliance.