Learn how Akamai API Security can safeguard your digital business and its data on several fronts.
API protection for GenAI workflows
Instant visibility and protection for all your APIs, from legacy to GenAI, LLM, and MCP servers. Learn how to identify vulnerabilities and analyze API behavior so you can detect attacks and remediate risk in this fast-growing attack surface.
Find and eliminate hidden API security risks
How API Security works
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
Customer Stories
API Security Use Cases
AI security
Test your APIs
Inventory your APIs
Understand your API risk posture
Monitor API abuse
AI security
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 your APIs
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.
Inventory your APIs
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
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
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.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
App & API Protector and API Security are two different solutions that Akamai offers to protect your business.
- App & API Protector discovers and mitigates API threats for all your web apps and APIs that are run through Akamai Cloud. It is capable of blocking any in-line traffic containing potential threats to your business.
- API Security is platform-agnostic and provides comprehensive discovery and visibility to all API endpoints enterprise-wide. It provides real-time traffic analysis of API activity and determines specific responses that you should take to mitigate newly exploited API traffic.
When deployed together, App & API Protector and API Security work in-line and offer the most comprehensive and continuous visibility into APIs. They allow you to discover, audit, detect, and respond to API concerns across your full estate. Moreover, the integration between the two solutions will enable the most robust and simple implementation of API Security.
Yes, our API testing solution is purpose-built to provide comprehensive coverage of API-specific vulnerabilities. Our solution can help you shift left and bake API security testing into every phase of development.
API Security monitors and protects both east-west and north-south traffic, reviewing all the APIs across your enterprise for anomalies that could indicate a security risk.
API Security identifies which APIs contain personally identifiable information (PII), internal documentation, intellectual property, and more, so you can automate protections for those APIs specifically. All traffic samples are obfuscated — suspicious or not — and are viewable by administrators and contributors only, simplifying your privacy and compliance initiatives.
API Security is platform-agnostic and works in all environments — SaaS, hybrid, and on-prem — including those that are complex and have multiple CDNs, WAFs, and gateways, and are widely distributed APIs across the enterprise (both north-south and east-west). API Security provides enterprise-wide visibility into your API behavior, regardless of where the APIs are discovered.
Akamai API Security features a native connector that enables you to seamlessly send a copy of your Akamai Cloud traffic to Akamai API Security for analysis. This integration is built directly into both API Security and Akamai Cloud, eliminating latency and reducing risk. The native connector automatically discovers and tracks APIs across Akamai-managed environments, helps detect vulnerabilities, and allows customers to block attackers at the edge.
API Security covers all the OWASP Top 10 API Security Risks.
Resources
Discover the critical capabilities of API Security with a live demo
Meet 1:1 with an Akamai expert for a tailored walk-through of how API Security can protect your unique environment.
Explore hands-on examples of key capabilities that help prevent attacks, including:
- Discovery and monitoring: Instantly detect and respond to threats with our 24/7 monitoring system
- Alerts: Investigate how posture and runtime alerts are handled
- Easy integration: Seamlessly integrate with your existing tech stack, no matter the complexity
Schedule your personalized demo in two easy steps:
- Submit the form
- Book a time with our team
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Gartner, Voice of the Customer for API Protection, Peer Community Contributor, 24 April 2026