API & Application Protection
Stop credential stuffing, scraping, and abuse targeting your REST and GraphQL APIs — with per-endpoint rate limiting, anomaly detection, and machine learning-based request scoring.
API attack vectors DataSec covers
APIs are increasingly the primary attack surface — bots bypass web frontends entirely to target your backend directly.
Credential Stuffing via API
Automated testing of breached credentials against login and account creation endpoints. DataSec applies rate limits and behavioral scoring per-endpoint, not just per-IP.
Price & Inventory Scraping
Bots querying your product catalog, pricing, or availability APIs at machine speed. Detection combines request frequency analysis with TLS fingerprinting to identify automation.
Account Enumeration
Bots probing endpoints to enumerate valid usernames, emails, or account IDs. DataSec detects enumeration patterns and applies progressive rate limiting before full blocking.
SMS/Email OTP Abuse
Bots triggering OTP generation endpoints in bulk — causing real costs and user confusion. Per-recipient rate limiting stops abuse while allowing legitimate authentication flows.
Payment & Checkout Abuse
Card testing and carding attacks via payment APIs. Request anomaly scoring identifies bot patterns in payment flows without adding friction to real checkout attempts.
GraphQL Complexity Attacks
Deeply nested or circular GraphQL queries designed to exhaust server resources. Query complexity analysis prevents expensive query abuse without blocking legitimate heavy queries.
WAAP: why API protection and app protection converge
Web Application and API Protection (WAAP) has emerged as the umbrella category combining what used to be sold as separate products: WAF-style application protection and API-specific security tooling. The reason they converged is straightforward — modern web applications expose most of their attack surface through APIs rather than through traditional HTML forms. A user logging in, adding an item to a cart, or submitting a payment is calling an API endpoint. The "web application" and "the API" are the same thing.
Web application security that only covers the browser-rendered layer misses the majority of real attack traffic. Bots don't use browsers — they call your REST endpoints directly, often using the same endpoint structure that your mobile apps use. A WAAP platform treats web application and API protection as a unified problem rather than bolting API security onto a product designed for browser-based traffic.
DataSec's WAAP approach means the same behavioral detection model covers your marketing site, your customer portal, your REST API, and your GraphQL endpoint — with per-surface tuning rather than a one-size-fits-all rule set. Web application and API protection works best when you're not maintaining separate policies for each surface.
API security tools vs. WAAP platforms
Point-solution API security tools typically focus on schema validation (blocking requests that don't match your OpenAPI spec), authentication checks, and basic rate limiting. These catch malformed or unauthenticated requests — but they don't catch behaviorally sophisticated automated abuse that sends structurally valid requests at scale. A full WAAP platform combines API security tools' structural checks with behavioral bot detection and application-layer analysis in one. DataSec operates as an API security platform in this broader sense — structural enforcement plus behavioral scoring, covering both API-only and browser-originated traffic in a single policy layer.
Securing REST APIs specifically
REST API security involves a distinct set of attack patterns beyond what general web security covers. Three of the most commonly exploited in the wild:
Broken object-level authorization (BOLA)
REST APIs typically expose resources by ID: GET /api/orders/12345. BOLA attacks involve an authenticated user systematically requesting other users' resource IDs — the API authenticates the request but doesn't verify that the requesting user owns the object. DataSec detects enumeration patterns (sequential or scattered ID probing) and applies rate limiting per authenticated identity, not just per IP, to flag and throttle BOLA-pattern requests before data exposure occurs. Protecting REST APIs against this requires per-identity rate limiting, which IP-only enforcement misses entirely.
Excessive data exposure
Many REST APIs return more fields than the consuming application actually displays — relying on the client to filter. Bots and scrapers exploit this by calling endpoints directly and harvesting all returned fields, including ones never rendered in the UI. Secure REST API design addresses this at the API layer (field filtering per consumer), but DataSec adds a behavioral detection layer that identifies clients systematically extracting data across paginated responses at machine speed — distinct from a legitimate user browsing the same data.
Lack of rate limiting and API gateway security
An API endpoint without rate limiting is an open invitation to brute-force and enumeration attacks. Even with a rate limiter in place, per-IP limits are trivially bypassed via distributed sources. DataSec enforces rate limits at API gateway level keyed on composite identifiers — API key, user ID, device fingerprint, and IP in combination — so that rotating IPs doesn't reset the rate limit clock. API gateway security integration supports Kong, Apigee, and AWS API Gateway natively. Contact us for a specific integration guide for your stack.
Example: rate-limit + behavioral check middleware for a REST endpoint
// Express middleware — DataSec risk check before endpoint handler
app.post('/api/auth/login', datasec.middleware({
rateLimit: { window: '15m', max: 10, keyBy: ['ip', 'body.email'] },
riskThreshold: 0.75, // block if score > 0.75
challenge: 0.5, // invisible challenge if score > 0.5
onBlock: (req, res) => res.status(429).json({ error: 'Too many attempts' })
}), async (req, res) => {
// Your login handler — only reached by requests that passed the check
const { email, password } = req.body;
// ...
});FAQ
Frequently asked questions
Yes. For pure machine-to-machine API traffic where there's no browser involved, DataSec relies on TLS fingerprinting, IP reputation, rate-pattern analysis, and request anomaly scoring. The behavioral layer (mouse/keyboard biometrics) is only applied where a browser is present.
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