White Paper API Secure

The 4 Pillars of API Security

A practical strategy for securing APIs in 2025. As APIs become the core of every digital business, and the leading criminal attack vector, the "AI will save you" promise of real-time, block-and-stop runtime defense has fallen short. This white paper, written by Mark Boyd and published by apidays with a foreword by Corey J. Ball (author of Hacking APIs), lays out a four-pillar approach (Discovery, Posture Management & ASPM, Testing with Context, and Observability & Runtime) that any organization can maintain in about 30 minutes a week. Download it for the full strategy, checklist, and a realistic look at where AI actually fits in API security.

Inside the White Paper

What You Will Learn

  • The four pillars of a modern API security strategy and how each maps to a specific business driver, from record API growth and ecosystem complexity to GenAI-enabled attacks.
  • The 30-minutes-a-week approach to discovering shadow and zombie APIs, hardening posture, testing with context (SAST, DAST, BOLA, IDOR, SSRF), and monitoring at runtime.
  • Where AI truly fits, and why signature-and-AI-only runtime defenses fall short, plus a real Data Theorem case of shadow APIs found on an unapproved cloud via app reverse engineering.
  1. OWASP API Top 10 (BOLA cited as the top API risk)
  2. Threat intelligence feeds / watchlists (used to verify bad actors and SDK/IP risk)
Blog

API Runtime Protection: Blocking Attacks While the Fix Ships

API runtime protection is security that watches live API traffic in production and stops attacks as they happen. It protects APIs during the time between a vulnerability being found and the fix being deployed, and against attacks on flaws nobody has found yet.

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API Security Testing: How to Test APIs the Way Attackers Do

API security testing is the practice of probing APIs the way an attacker would, to find flaws such as broken authorization, data exposure and injection before someone exploits them. Effective API security testing runs authenticated, covers every API you have (including the ones nobody inventoried) and repeats every time an API changes.

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Video

Automated Security for DevOps

Modern software teams can’t afford to treat security as a final step before release. In this on-demand video, learn how automated application security enables DevSecOps by integrating continuous security testing directly into CI/CD pipelines. Discover how automation helps identify vulnerabilities earlier, prioritize real risk, accelerate remediation, and deliver secure software without slowing development.

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