Trend: API market is growing, but users are ignoring security

Postman’s 2024 State of API report finds that companies are increasingly treating APIs as a product and developing, marketing, and monetizing them exclusively. For users who integrate the interface, security aspects are often left to the side.

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API platform Postman, which itself provides API marketing services, surveyed more than 5,600 software developers for the report, 62 percent of whom work on payment interfaces. 21 percent of the companies surveyed generate more than three-quarters of their total annual revenue from their public APIs. Even big telecom providers are getting a taste of it.

Secure Coding: Prevent Unauthorized Access via Path Traversal (CWE-22).

Apart from marketing, there are other factors driving the increased use of APIs, first of all the strong interest in artificial intelligence. OpenAI alone is responsible for 79 percent of API traffic on the Postman platform. There are also interfaces to Gemini, Mistral and Perplexity. On the other hand, developers are increasingly integrating software-as-a-service offerings like Salesforce, WhatsApp, and PayPal into their applications.

The report also observed a certain pragmatism among API users. Only 44 percent of developers still search source code, and more than half work with product managers, QA, and designers who can’t always interpret the code.

When choosing a public API, good documentation is considered more important than performance or security. This in turn makes APIs increasingly interesting to attackers, who are also helped by the fact that 27 percent of companies surveyed do not use API key vault security tools. Those who use them also rely on AWS Key Management (28 percent) and Azure Key Vault (24 percent).

The fact that nearly a third of API providers use multiple gateways to provide interfaces makes control even more difficult. The report states that 46 percent of respondents rely on Jira/Confluence and 44 percent rely on email to stay informed about updates. Here the document clearly recommends that companies should pay attention to observation and governance to combat cyber attacks.

a new one status of api report 2024 It is available free online and provides much information about technological and economic trends. Postman provides an API development, management, and marketing platform with over 35 million users worldwide.

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