Preventing API Breaches: A Security Checklist
Hey everyone, I’d like you all to meet John. John is a full-stack engineer working for a FinTech startup. He’s talented, ambitious, and always on the lookout for ways to make his code efficient and scalable. One day, he’s been tasked with building a backend service that exposes an API for their web applications. Excited, John dives headfirst into the project.
Fast forward a couple of weeks. John’s API is live, and his team is thrilled with the performance. But then — it happens. Their first API breach. Late one evening, an unexpected surge of unusual traffic triggers an alert. After hours of investigation, John and his team discover that a vulnerability in the API allowed a malicious actor to bypass authentication and scrape sensitive user data. The fallout is swift — customer complaints flood in & the startup’s reputation takes a significant hit.
John’s story might happen to any of us in real life. As developers, we often focus on functionality and performance, sometimes overlooking security until it’s too late. To help avoid such pitfalls, here’s a comprehensive API Security Checklist to follow:
Access
- Limit requests (Throttling) to avoid DDoS / brute-force attacks.
- Use HTTPS on server side with TLS 1.2+ and secure ciphers to avoid MITM (Man in the Middle…
