So, your APIs are doing pretty well. That’s great news! But there is a problem. Securing one or two APIs is one thing; securing hundreds or thousands that are changing daily is a completely different situation.
As you grow, the “set it and forget it” security you started with and which was effective in the beginning, will no longer work. Attacks become more common, and the traditional tools often just can’t keep up. It’s so easy to make a small mistake that leads to a huge breach. Let’s first discuss the pitfalls, and then take a look at the tools that can help you avoid these pitfalls.
Avoid These Pitfalls
Here’s what to look out for as you scale API Security Tools.
“Ghost” APIs
This is problem #1. As you scale, teams move fast. Developers spin up new endpoints for a quick feature, forget to document them, or forget to decommission old versions. These “shadow” (undocumented) and “zombie” (old/unpatched) APIs cannot be seen by your security tools but can be seen by attackers. How can you secure what you don’t know you have if your solution doesn’t have a strong discovery component?
Another common top problem is when the tool gives you 10,000 “critical” or “urgent” alerts every day. That’s just noise. As your traffic scales, the number of false positives can explode and result in “alert fatigue.” Your security team will start ignoring the alerts, and that’s when a real attack will have the chance to slip through.
Only Watching the Front Door
Many teams put a strong guard (like a WAF or API gateway) at the main entrance. But in a modern microservices setup, most of the communication happens inside your network. If an attacker breaches one small service, can they move around freely? Or will there be something to stop them even when they are already inside? You have to secure the internal traffic, too.
Traditional tools often fail to secure internal traffic. They are great at stopping known attacks, like a classic SQL injection. But modern API attacks are often about abusing business logic. An attacker realizes they can change quantity=1 to quantity=-100 in a shopping cart API to give themselves a refund. A simple WAF just won’t catch that.
Department of No
If your security tool is slow, clunky, and breaks builds, developers will hate it. And when developers hate a tool, they find ways to bypass it (creating more shadow APIs!). Your tools must integrate smoothly, provide clear feedback (not “it’s just broken”), and not become a bottleneck.
If your new security solution adds 300ms of latency to every single API call, you just ruined your user experience. As you scale, your security layer has to scale with you.
Top API Security Tools
Now that you know what you should avoid when scaling your API tools, here are some of the best API security tools that take care of everything so you don’t fall into these pitfalls.
Aikido
API Security helps protect your application’s APIs from unauthorized access, data breaches, and automated attacks.
Core Security Capabilities
- Dependencies (SCA): Checks if any open-source bits you used have known security problems.
- SAST: Scans your own code to find security mistakes before you even run it.
- Secrets: Make sure you haven’t accidentally left passwords or API keys just lying around in your code.
- Malware: Scans your project to make sure no nasty malware is hidden inside.
- Container Images: Checks your app’s “shipping containers” (like Docker) for any security holes.
- Infrastructure as Code: Reads your cloud setup files to spot security goof-ups before you go live.
- License Risk & SBOMs: Manages the legal fine print for your code’s parts and creates a “list of ingredients” for your software.
- Outdated Software: Taps you on the shoulder when any part of your software is old and needs an update.
- Code Quality: Points out sloppy code that might not be a security flaw yet, but could cause trouble.
Cloud Security & Visibility
- CSPM: Keeps an eye on your live cloud accounts and alerts you to security issues.
- Virtual Machines: Scans your virtual servers for vulnerabilities.
- Cloud Search: A search bar that lets you find any of your “things” across all your cloud accounts.
- Container & K8s Runtime Scanning: Watches your live containers for any suspicious activity after they’ve been launched.
Application Protection & Automation
- Runtime Protection: Blocks attacks as they happen for the live app.
Testing
- Autonomous Pentests: It tries to break into your system to find weak spots.
- DAST: Tests your running app from the outside to find security gaps.
- API Scanning: Automatically finds, maps, and pokes at your APIs to find flaws, even the “shadow” or “zombie” ones you forgot.
- Attack Surface Management: Discovers all your internet-facing apps so you know what you need to protect.
Platform Features
- AI AutoFix: Uses AI to suggest, or even write, the code to fix security problems.
- IDE: Shows you security warnings inside your code editor while you’re typing.
- On-prem scanning: Lets you run security scans on your own private servers.
Salt Security
Salt Security is an AI-infused API Security Solution that covers the whole API lifecycle.
Key Features
- API discovery & visibility: It can find all APIs, including those you didn’t know existed.
- API posture & compliance: It checks where your policies fall short or do not match security rules, and helps you fix them.
- Integrations: It can integrate into the tools your team already likes and uses.
Additional Key Features
- Patented behavioral analysis: It uses smart AI to understand your API’s normal behavior to be able to detect subtle, “slow-and-slow” attacks and catch sneaky hackers.
- Full API lifecycle protection: Ensures security for your APIs from the very start to when they’re running live in production.
- Real-time, continuous discovery: It automatically finds APIs as soon as they appear, including shadow ones and those that have been deprecated.
- Stops attackers in the reconnaissance phase: Catches and blocks hackers while they’re just “casing the joint.”
- AI Agent Security: Monitors how AI bots are using your APIs to make sure they aren’t going rogue or being hijacked.
- Policy Hub for governance: Lets you create your own security rules and checks them against global ones.
42Crunch
This is an API Security platform that helps automate end-to-end API security.
Key features
- API Governance: The platform enables exploring and cataloging APIs automatically. It also automatically builds contracts (like a rulebook) for them and connects to your code.
- Security Governance & Compliance: The API contracts are both standardized and secured, which gives you the ability to manage security compliance rules and runtime security policies all from a central place.
- API Security Testing & Vulnerability Detection: It gives the developers tools that they can use to test their APIs with no false positives… You can also calculate your API’s security score against 300+ checks and benefit from auto-fuzzing.
- Runtime API Threat Protection: It uses your API’s “rulebook” to automatically block attacks and find hidden or old APIs, and it works with whatever gateway you have.
- Leverages the OpenAPI Specification (OAS): The whole platform is built around using your API’s design file (the OpenAPI spec) to lock it down from the start.
- IDE: It plugs right into your developer’s code editor, so they can track security issues while they’re still coding.
- Deploy Anywhere!: You can run it pretty much anywhere, especially in modern cloud setups like Kubernetes.
Summing Up
The list of pitfalls was quite long, and it’s easy to fall into at least one of them, if not all. It’s a game of Whac-A-Mole where the “moles” are invisible (“ghost” APIs), multiply every second, and have their own bad business logic.
The good news is you don’t have to solve all this manually. The reason we can point out these pitfalls is that a new generation of security tools has emerged specifically to fix them. They’re built for a world of fast-moving pipelines, microservices, and complex business logic. They focus on discovery (finding those ghosts) and behavior (spotting those new “Old Playbook” attacks).
