Automating connections from 3rd party providers makes it easy to access your financial data because people re-use their logins and these logins have been repeatedly leaked online.
New data from security and content delivery company Akamai shows that one in every five attempts to gain unauthorized access to user accounts is now done through application programming interfaces (APIs) instead of user-facing login pages. This trend is even more pronounced in the financial services industry where the use of APIs is widespread and in part fueled by regulatory requirements.
According to a report released today, between December 2017 and November 2019, Akamai observed 85.4 billion credential abuse attacks against companies worldwide that use its services. Of those attacks, around 16.5 billion, or nearly 20%, targeted hostnames that were clearly identified as API endpoints. However, in the financial industry, the percentage of attacks that targeted APIs rose sharply between May and September 2019, at times reaching 75%.
“API usage and widespread adoption have enabled criminals to automate their attacks,” the company said in its report. “This is why the volume of credential stuffing incidents has continued to grow year over year, and why such attacks remain a steady and constant risk across all market segments.”
The credential stuffing problem
Credential stuffing, a type of brute-force attack where criminals use lists of leaked username and password combinations to gain access to accounts, has become a major problem in recent years. This is a consequence of the large number of data breaches over the past decade that have resulted in billions of stolen credentials being released publicly on the internet or sold on underground markets as commodities.
Knowing that users reuse passwords across various websites, attackers have used the credentials exposed in data breaches to build so-called combo lists. These lists of username and password combinations are then loaded into botnets or automated tools and are used to flood websites with login requests in an attempt to gain access.
However, once access is gained, extracting information from the affected services by crawling the customer pages requires some effort and customization, whereas requesting and extracting information through APIs is standardized and well suited for automation. After all, the very purpose of an API is to facilitate applications talking to each other and exchanging data automatically.
Source: APIs are becoming a major target for credential stuffing attacks
Robin Edgar
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