API attack surfaces are unknown, and so are the risks.
Three reasons your API attack surface stays hidden.
Undocumented APIs built by dev teams, acquired through M&A, or exposed by third-parties expand your attack surface.
Harness continuously maps APIs across environments, surfacing shadow and zombie APIs automatically.
API endpoints are unvalidated, unmonitored, and prone to abuse because their existence or purpose are unknown.
Harness flags API risks and prioritizes remediation based on exposure, data sensitivity, and exploitability.
API functionality changes, PII slips into a response, and your spec no longer describes reality, creating a new attack vector.
Harness enables continuous conformance against OpenAPI specifications, reducing risk from API drift instantly.
Prevent API sprawl with AI.
Always-on Inventory of Endpoints. Harness offers 30+ instrumentation methods to integrate into your tech stack and cover North-south, East-west, and Third-party traffic.
Real Traffic. Posture analysis uses live traffic patterns, not static metadata alone. API designs drift over time, but your security approach doesn't have to compromise.
Fast Finding & Fixing. Rank findings by who can reach an API and what it touches so the top of your priority list is always the highest-impact fix to stay ahead of attackers.
Analyze APIs across environments.
Shadow API Risk. Discover undocumented APIs from dev teams, M&A, or third parties that expand your attack surface without central visibility.
Zombie API Risk. Surface deprecated endpoints still receiving traffic before attackers exploit these unmonitored, unmaintained endpoints.
Third-party Service Mapping. Identify partner and third-party API integrations and get a handle on your digital supply chain risk.
Assess your real application risk.
OWASP API Security Top 10. Automatically assess your API inventory against common vulnerabilities and prioritize remediation.
Risk Scoring & Prioritization. Quantify risks based on exposure, sensitive data, authentication, and exploitability so you can focus on the highest-impact issues first.
Access Control Gaps. Identify APIs where authentication or authorization are lacking, including those handling sensitive data.
Know where sensitive data moves.
Sensitive Data Exposures. Continuously identify data handled by API endpoints and classify what sensitive data is exposed.
Data Security for APIs. Prioritize which of your applications need greater security controls to protect sensitive data and intellectual property.
Compliance & Audit Readiness. Continuously validate APIs against regulatory requirements (PCI DSS, HIPAA, GDPR) and internal security policies so audits don't become fire drills.
Common questions answered
API discovery involves identifying and cataloging all APIs running in all your environments to create a complete, accurate, and current API inventory. Discovery should encompass internal, private cloud, public cloud, and third-party APIs.
API discovery finds APIs, ideally done continuously as APIs evolve or new endpoints manifest. API inventory, sometimes referred to as API catalog, is the maintained record of what's been discovered that includes endpoints (or URLs), owners, versions, environments, and risk context.
API discovery helps reduce risk by uncovering unknown (shadow), unmanaged, and exposed APIs that are frequent attack vectors to abuse functionality or exfiltrate data. Security teams use API inventory to gain visibility into the attack surface, employ security monitoring, and implement protective controls.
Zombie APIs are endpoints that have been deprecated or endpoints thought to be retired that still exist in running systems. Zombie APIs increase exposure and are often easy targets because they're typically unmonitored, unmaintained, and unhardened.
Shadow APIs are undocumented or unknown APIs running without central visibility. They commonly arise from third-party procurement, rapid development without documentation, and lack of API management.
While API specifications can be useful metadata, application teams don't always produce or maintain them. API discovery tools combine traffic-based discovery from multiple points of architecture including API gateways, perimeter proxies, WAFs, and Kubernetes clusters with additional analysis to reveal API metadata not present in API specs.
API discovery in microservices and Kubernetes relies on telemetry gathered from ingress controllers, API gateways, sidecars, and agents (like eBPF) within running workloads to map inner service calls and external API endpoints.
API discovery uses cloud-native signals from cloud architectural elements such as application load balancers, API gateways, logs, and mirrored traffic to construct and maintain API inventory across cloud tenants in providers like AWS, Azure, and GCP.
API catalogs are often static, informed by API management tools, or exist within developer experience platforms. Continuous API discovery is a powerful complement that can enrich the catalog with the actual environmental configuration, data classifications, and relative security risk so development teams source functionally-appropriate and secure APIs.
Prioritize based on network placement (public cloud, private cloud, internal, third-party SaaS, partner integrations), sensitive data handled, authentication and authorization in place, Internet reachability, and usage levels. API discovery tools aid in this data collection and analysis so you can focus testing and protection on the riskiest endpoints.
Get started with Harness API Discovery
Get a demo of Harness API Discovery to see how it can help you fight API sprawl, classify sensitive data flows, and identify risks to your APIs.