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Broken object level authentication is the cause for almost half of API-related threats. The attackers will change their own ID into another user’s ID in the API request, and without proper authorization checks are able to access sensitive data.

Broken authentication in API allows an attacker to use stolen credentials, authentication tokens, and brute-force attacks to assume other users’ identities.

When the API provides more data than the client needs, an attacker can use this “useless” data to further exploitations.

The API needs to be protected against a huge amount of calls or payload sizes. Anyway, the attackers can flood the API with numerous requests and calls. In other words Denial of Service (DoS).

If the API authorization is poorly implemented, attackers can find a way to use admin-level API paths to add, update, or delete customer records or user roles.

When the API consumes input data directly without proper filtering and writes it to the business logic, the API is vulnerable to mass assignment. The attackers can try to find out critical data properties or provide additional ones that can lead to privilege escalation.

There are numerous kinds of security misconfigurations like incomplete and ad-hoc, default API configurations, which can negatively impact API security and create vulnerable surfaces in the API.

The well-known vulnerability among IT developers is the injection. The attacker creates a malicious input that the API forwards blindly to an internal interpreter like SQL, NoSQL, LDAP, etc.

Attackers find outdated or incomplete versions of the API like staging, beta, and test versions, which suffer from a lack of protection not like the original API in the production. The attackers can use these versions to exploit vulnerabilities.

Insufficient logging and monitoring do not make the API vulnerable directly but deprive the opportunity to investigate the possible attacks against the API, so these attacks stay unnoticed.