Why API Discovery Matters
API discovery is the first step in understanding the API landscape within your organization. By systematically identifying and cataloging your public-facing API resources, you can mitigate security risks and address vulnerabilities proactively. An effective API discovery strategy helps uncover unauthorized hosting providers and strengthens your defense against potential cyber threats.

This article will guide you through the best practices for API discovery and highlight the key measurement categories that should be tracked for optimal security and visibility.

What Should You Measure? Key Categories for API Discovery

To ensure that your APIs are secure, relevant, and well-managed, it’s important to track five primary categories using Attack Surface Discovery. Below are the best practices associated with each category, along with insights into how Attack Surface Discovery capabilities can enhance your discovery process.

1.  API Hosts - One of the fundamental aspects of API discovery is confirming that the number of API hosts matches your expectations. This step ensures that no rogue or unauthorized APIs are exposed, which could potentially be exploited by attackers.

• Best Practices: Track API Host Numbers: Regularly compare the discovered hosts with the expected values. Unexpected discrepancies could indicate the presence of unapproved API endpoints.
• Limit Exposure: Ensuring that only the necessary API hosts are exposed reduces the surface area available for attack.
• Attack Surface Discovery Capabilities: allows you to validate the number of API hosts with ease. Its detailed scanning ensures that all known and unknown hosts are accounted for, helping you spot rogue APIs that might pose security risks.

2. Subdomains - API discovery extends beyond the main API hosts to include subdomains. It's important to ensure that all subdomains associated with API hosts are accounted for, including less commonly used ones.

• Best Practices: Identify Hidden Subdomains:  Subdomains may contain valuable APIs that are not actively monitored. These overlooked endpoints can create serious security gaps.
• Maintain Visibility: By cataloging subdomains, you improve your organization’s visibility over its API infrastructure, enabling better control and risk management.
• Attack Surface Discovery Capabilities:  provides a comprehensive view of all API subdomains. By identifying even low-use subdomains, you can mitigate potential security issues that may arise from overlooked or forgotten endpoints.

3. API Endpoints - Not every API is necessary, and having redundant or outdated APIs can pose unnecessary security risks. Ensuring that only essential APIs are in use is crucial for reducing exposure and optimizing security.

• Best Practices: Engage with Development Teams:  Regularly involve development teams to assess which APIs are still needed. This will help keep your API infrastructure clean and secure.
• Remove Redundancies: Periodically audit APIs and eliminate redundant or outdated endpoints to minimize your API attack surface.
• Attack Surface Discovery Capabilities: provides insights into your API usage, making it easier to identify redundant or unused APIs. The tool’s customizable detection algorithms can help prioritize APIs based on relevance and necessity, aligning with your internal assessments.

4. Hosting Providers - The choice of hosting provider is a critical element in the security of your APIs. Evaluating the hosting providers for your APIs (e.g., AWS, Azure) ensures that they comply with security standards and align with your overall security policies.

• Best Practices: Security Compliance: Ensure that all hosting providers used for your APIs meet your organization’s security standards.
• Consolidate Hosting Providers: Where possible, consolidating API hosting to a few trusted providers can streamline management and improve security.
• Attack Surface Discovery Capabilities: can assess the security posture of the hosting providers for each discovered API. By evaluating factors like access control, data protection, and infrastructure security, you can determine if the hosting providers align with your security requirements.

5. API Protection / Gatways - APIs must be adequately protected by security mechanisms such as API gateways, firewalls, and Content Delivery Networks (CDNs). Ensuring that these protections are in place helps to prevent unauthorized access and data breaches.

• Best Practices: Use Security Gateways: Deploy API gateways that enforce strong authentication, authorization, and encryption standards.
• Leverage CDNs and Firewalls: Ensure that your APIs are shielded from attacks by employing CDNs and firewalls that can mitigate DDoS and other malicious activities.
• Attack Surface Discovery Capabilities: scans for API protection mechanisms, offering insights into whether your APIs are shielded by the appropriate security tools. The tool helps verify that APIs are not vulnerable due to a lack of protection, giving you actionable data to improve security.

6. Enhancing API Discovery with Attack Surface Discovery - provides rich insights into each finding, empowering users to take control of their API security. The platform enables you to:

• Customize Detection Algorithms: Fine-tune your discovery settings to match your environment and security needs.
• Reproduce Issues: Easily reproduce any detected issues to gain deeper insights and make improvements.
• Access API Request and Response Data: View detailed request and response data for each discovered API, giving you visibility into API interactions.

7. Reporting and Collaboration -  offers several reporting options to ensure that you can share and delegate findings efficiently:

• Integrate API Discovery into Security Operations - leverage our graph QL API to pull discovery findings that match your specific criteria. Manually looking for specific findings in the UI can become a tedious task , using graphql to build custom report or exporting this data to your own analytics system is the most efficent approach. 
• Graphical Reports: Visualize your API findings in an easy-to-understand format.
• PDF Executive Summary Reports:** Generate executive summaries for senior management, offering a high-level overview of the API landscape and security posture.
• Raw Data Export (Excel): Export raw data capturing IP addresses, security findings, and other key API details. This data can be shared with security teams or application owners for further analysis and action.
• Custom Reporting - Leveraging Graph QL API to pull host or end point information that match specific criteria"; In build report is limited  and can not be implemented into any automated workflow.  

Conclusion

Effective API discovery is a crucial step in securing your organization’s digital ecosystem. By following these best practices and leveraging Attack Surface Discovery, you can systematically validate your API infrastructure, identify vulnerabilities, and ensure that your APIs are well-protected. With API Spyder’s rich features and customizable detection capabilities, you can confidently manage your public-facing APIs, reduce exposure to security threats, and maintain a secure digital environment.

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