Why Bot Mitigation for APIs is Crucial for Enterprises

APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) have in recent years become a crucial component of the modern Web ecosystem, helping seamlessly interconnect a wide array of systems, networks, and architectures. They allow information to flow in real-time to facilitate the exchange of data between virtually every conceivable type of website and application used for virtually any purpose. When we use a modern website or mobile application, much of the dynamic content we interact with has probably been provided through an API.

A vast range of APIs provides information that allows websites and apps to carry out identity or address verification, determine users’ locations and IP addresses, perform credit checks, interact with banking and payment processing services, and much more. While much of the content we see on a website or app is static, on the back end the website or app needs to query databases through APIs to provide dynamic information that’s displayed to the user, such as pricing or availability, and so on. On an e-commerce site, for example, various APIs are queried during a customer’s visit to find out whether a product is in stock when it will ship, along with notification services APIs that track the product’s journey from warehouse to consumer.

Figure 1: A single API call can be exploited to systematically scrape data

Read the complete blog post on “Why Bot Mitigation for APIs is Crucial for Enterprises”. Originally published at www.radwarebotmanager.com on January 24, 2021