Overview

API protection for GenAI workflows

Instant visibility and protection for all your APIs, from legacy servers to GenAI, LLM, and MCP. Learn how to identify vulnerabilities and analyze API behavior so you can detect attacks and remediate risks in this rapidly evolving attack environment.

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Features

  • Assess API traffic with a native connection to Akamai CDN and find APIs in source code to identify the types of sensitive data that your APIs can access
  • Automatically discover, inventory, and tag all APIs connecting to GenAI models, LLMs, and AI services, including shadow and unmanaged endpoints
  • Detect APIs connected to Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers to identify shadow integrations and ensure safe AI agent adoption
  • Analyze APIs for OWASP Top 10 API Security Risks and prioritize vulnerabilities by impact for rapid remediation
  • Understand API context with visualizations of business logic, physical network infrastructure, and API traffic flows
  • Continuously monitor for compliance with regulatory requirements, industry standards, and internal policies
  • Identify anomalous usage, API attacks, data leakage, tampering, and policy violations
  • Block API attacks and set up workflows to accelerate remediation, or leverage Managed Security Service to increase your SOC effectiveness
  • Fully integrate with your existing CI/CD pipelines and automatically run 200+ tests that simulate malicious traffic

Find and eliminate potential API security risks

Discover your complete API estate

Automatically discover, inventory, and tag shadow, zombie, and AI-related APIs to enable instant governance and compliance.

Identify vulnerable APIs

Audit for the API vulnerabilities and misconfigurations that attackers target, including all of the OWASP API Top 10.

Prevent API abuse and attacks

Use contextual insights to identify risks such as data leakage, suspicious behavior, malicious bots, and API attacks.

How API Security works

Detect

Generate a comprehensive API inventory, including how many — and what type of — APIs you have.

Test

Add security to your CI/CD pipeline, without sacrificing speed, to secure APIs before putting them into production.

Detect

Identify API vulnerabilities and attacks with automated, machine-learning-fueled detection.

Respond

Create advanced workflows to remediate API issues by integrating with your WAFs, SIEMs, and ITSM tools.

Client

Netskope

The security leader has used Akamai API Security to help thousands of customers comply and secure tens of thousands of APIs.

Novant Health

Novant Health finds and mitigates API risk with visibility, data protection, and “shift-left” testing with the help of Akamai API Security.

DHgate

The China-based e-commerce platform provider has addressed the security issues related to the existing API system by developing an API Security solution

API Security: Use Cases

Learn how Akamai API Security can safeguard your digital business and its data on several fronts.

AI security

AI security for APIs delivers proactive defense against sophisticated threats targeting both traditional and AI-powered applications. By automatically discovering and classifying APIs that interact with GenAI models, LLMs, and AI services — including shadow or unmanaged endpoints — security teams can gain real-time visibility, enforce governance, and reduce compliance risks.

Test APIs before putting them into production

API testing is critical for your API security strategy because it helps organizations “shift left” — detecting and fixing vulnerabilities such as business logic abuse earlier in the software development lifecycle (SDLC), before APIs reach production.

With API testing, you can automatically run 150+ dynamic tests that simulate malicious traffic, including against the OWASP Top 10 API Security Risks. Schedule tests to run automatically at desired intervals at any stage of development.

Get an enterprise-wide inventory of your APIs

Maintaining a comprehensive and continuously updated inventory of all APIs across your organization is crucial for an effective API security strategy. On-demand or daily discovery is insufficient due to the severity of risks associated with API attacks. Moreover, visualizing actual API behavior (API calls) is necessary to enable key team members from security, development, and operations to understand how APIs are being used or misused. This facilitates communication and investigation across your organization’s teams. 

API Security offers automated and continuous discovery of APIs across various technologies and infrastructure. It also identifies newly deployed APIs and compares their properties with existing documentation. API Security detects often-missed shadow APIs and known API vulnerabilities, such as those outlined in the OWASP Top 10 API Security Risks

API discovery is an ongoing process, and our continuous monitoring finds new APIs and changes to existing ones around the clock. Security teams gain unparalleled visibility and are the first to know when developers deploy a new API or service.

Understand your API risk posture

APIs fuel every digital product and service that an enterprise rolls out. So it’s no surprise APIs are growing in scope and scale. But this proliferation leads to an API sprawl that is reshaping your attack surface.

Today’s attackers look for API vulnerabilities — including software bugs or configuration errors — that they can exploit to:

  • Gain access to sensitive application functionality
  • Find, compromise, and/or steal sensitive data
  • Misuse the API in malicious ways 

The OWASP Top 10 API Security Risks provide a helpful summary of some of the most commonly exploited API vulnerabilities and threats that organizations should try to identify and address.

With API security, you can prevent vulnerable and misconfigured APIs from exposing your enterprise to API attacks by promptly notifying security, developer, and API teams of potential risks, configuration errors, and vulnerabilities. You can also easily determine if a partner has set up your API incorrectly or if there are vulnerabilities in the code. 

Contextual and conditional alerts work seamlessly within your existing workflows, such as by automatically creating a Jira ticket, enabling you to swiftly resolve any issues.

Monitor API abuse

APIs are designed to be used programmatically, which makes differentiating legitimate usage from attacks and abuse extremely challenging.

While API attack methods vary, some of the most common approaches include:

  • Business logic abuse. Business logic attacks exploit application design or implementation flaws to prompt unexpected and unsanctioned behavior benefiting the attackers.
  • Unauthorized data access. This common attack method exploits broken authentication and authorization mechanisms to access restricted data.
  • Account takeover. Account takeover relies on credential theft or cross-site scripting attacks to exploit APIs by pretending to be a legitimate user.
  • Data scraping. Malicious actors may aggressively query publicly available resources to perform the wholesale capture of large, valuable datasets.
  • Business denial of service (DoS). Unrestricted API calls can cause “erosion of service” or a complete denial of service at the application layer.

Detecting and preventing these and other potential API security risks necessitates using advanced controls available in dedicated API security solutions as part of your broader application security strategy.

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