An app is a software application that performs specific tasks for the user, while an API (application programming interface) is a set of programming instructions and standards for accessing a web-based software application. An API provides the means for applications to interact with each other, and for developers to access data and functionality from other applications.
The challenge of application protection
Many security teams find it increasingly challenging to protect modern web applications and APIs successfully. Applications are constantly becoming more complex, especially with the growing adoption of microservices-based architecture. APIs are involved in virtually every online interaction, expanding the organization’s attack surface by creating new potential entry points for hackers. Together, apps and APIs are plagued by thousands of known web vulnerabilities, and attackers are discovering new weaknesses to exploit every day.
The task of application protection is made even more difficult by the evolving nature of attack vectors. Today’s cybercriminals are designing sophisticated campaigns that combine botnets, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) for hire, and attacks on vulnerabilities in web applications, mobile apps, APIs, and client-side servers.
Akamai can help. Our application security solution, Akamai App & API Protector, is a cloud-based offering that enhances and simplifies data protection to defend your organization from a wide range of network and application layer threats — with less effort and overhead.
The rise of threats to application security
Applications and APIs have become increasingly critical to business success. Employees, partners, providers, customers, and other users rely on a broad array of applications to communicate, collaborate, and transact business. The use of APIs has exploded in recent years as organizations rely on them to power mobile applications, the Internet of Things (IoT), internal applications, partner applications, cloud-based customer services, and more.
The more that organizations rely on applications and APIs, the more attractive these digital assets are to attackers. Threat actors today use automated bots to crawl websites at random, looking for vulnerabilities in applications they can use to access a database, load malicious files onto a web server, or take down a server with an overwhelming amount of traffic.
To improve application security, IT teams have traditionally turned to cloud-based API and web application protection solutions to mitigate attacks. However, these technologies tend to rely on web application firewalls (WAFs) that inspect all web traffic and block malware. To stop app and API attacks while allowing legitimate traffic through, firewalls must be constantly tuned and reconfigured by cloud security teams as applications change, threats evolve, and updates are available. Since this task requires a highly skilled staff, scaling these app security solutions can be extremely difficult. As a result, app protection policies quickly become outdated, and security teams suffer from alert fatigue as firewalls have difficulty differentiating false positives from real attacks.
Clearly, effective application protection requires a simpler, more effective approach to identifying and blocking attacks at the application layer.
Application protection with Akamai
Akamai App & API Protector is a cloud-based solution that overcomes the challenges of WAF-based application protection. Built for simplicity, this Akamai solution lets your security team take a completely hands-off approach to protecting apps and APIs. From a self-service onboarding wizard to self-tuning recommendations, App & API Protector automates many aspects of application security while defending entire web and API estates and operating systems with a holistic set of powerful protections.
Functionality of this application protection solution includes:
Comprehensive security. Powered by an adaptive security engine, App & API Protector combines industry-leading core technologies in web application firewall, API security, bot mitigation, and DDoS protection.
Ease of use. Our technology is purpose-built with customer-focused authentication to provide a single solution for application security that is actually easy to use.
Adaptive protections. Our adaptive security engine assigns a threat score to each request — the higher the score, the more aggressive the protection provided to each application. By dynamically modifying protections according to the level of threat, we can successfully identify the most evasive attacks while drastically minimizing false positives.
Threat intelligence. As the world’s largest edge platform, our customers include many of the most-attacked websites on the internet. That gives us visibility into more than 16 million daily web app attacks, 12 billion bot requests, and over 280 million bot logins. Our threat researchers and data scientists analyze more than 300 TB of new attack data every day, producing insights and analysis that help us proactively and predictably stop both common and highly sophisticated attacks.
Advanced API capabilities. App & API Protector automatically discovers a full range of known, unknown, and changing APIs across your web traffic. Greater visibility helps to protect you against hidden attacks and reveal unexpected changes. When new APIs are discovered, you can easily register them with just a few clicks.
Advantages of App & API Protector
Akamai App & API Protector offers distinct benefits for your business.
Broad application protection
With Akamai, you can protect all your websites, applications, and APIs from a wide array of threats — automated botnets, volumetric DDoS, injection, API attacks, and more.
Easy maintenance
Automated updates ensure strong security while automatic self-tuning alleviates alert fatigue, reducing false positives by 5x, and allows your teams to focus on real attacks rather than false alerts.
Strengthened API security
Automatically discover and protect APIs from vulnerabilities, including the OWASP API Security Top 10.
Comprehensive capabilities in a single product
The Akamai security platform includes web application and API protections, bot visibility and mitigation, SIEM connectors, web optimization, DDoS protection, API acceleration, edge compute, and technology that provides access to thousands of DNS servers through the Akamai Intelligent Edge Platform.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Application protection is the task of preventing cybercriminals from targeting vulnerabilities in applications to illegitimately access an organization’s IT ecosystem, sensitive data, credentials, and other digital assets.
Despite their best efforts, developers of enterprise application software routinely release applications and APIs with flaws that can be exploited by cybercriminals. The number of known vulnerabilities in applications now exceeds 180,000, and new vulnerabilities are discovered every day. Protecting applications in this threat environment requires a multilayered approach to security that can mitigate a wide range of different types of attacks, including automated botnets, DDoS attacks, API-based attacks, and attacks on web applications.
WAAP is an acronym for web application and API protection, a class of security technologies designed to protect web applications and APIs from a broad range of increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks.
Why customers choose Akamai
Akamai powers and protects life online. Leading companies worldwide choose Akamai to build, deliver, and secure their digital experiences — helping billions of people live, work, and play every day. Akamai Connected Cloud, a massively distributed edge and cloud platform, puts apps and experiences closer to users and keeps threats farther away.