DEVOPSdigest

Traceable is providing the necessary API security measures to enable FDIC-insured financial institutions to meet the latest Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC) cybersecurity compliance mandates.

On October 3, 2022, the FFIEC announced a significant update to meet cybersecurity mandates for financial institutions. This update explicitly calls out APIs as a separate attack surface in regulatory guidelines that represents a significant shift in compliance trajectories, and highlights the increased threats that APIs pose. The FFIEC specifically created these new guidelines prompting financial institutions to inventory APIs as part of their overall inventory of information systems and risk assessments. For example, banks utilize APIs with their digital banking services and information system access points, making the sharing of data easier, and the customer banking experience better. However, as a top attack vector, APIs, when not carefully identified and secured, can be compromised in seconds – putting businesses and their customers’ sensitive data at significant risk.

“This year will be a reckoning for financial institutions. With an average of three banking-related APIs connected to customers, now is the time to understand your APIs and act immediately to protect your data and your customers,” said Richard Bird, Chief Security Officer at Traceable. “We have been working with large financial institutions to assess their APIs, enabling them to fully understand their threat posture. Most are shocked by the results. This initial shock is certainly the trigger for them to get a comprehensive picture of the APIs they have – current and legacy as well as internal and external. Knowing this enables them to act immediately.”

APIs are now the primary attack vector for data breaches, and Traceable is working closely with the top financial institutions to enable them to take the first step in securing their APIs - as required by FFIEC. Traceable discovers and identifies all APIs - internal, external, third-party and partner APIs, with its data-rich catalog, for comprehensive and real-time visibility into clients’ entire API ecosystem and API sprawl.

With Traceable’s approach, financial institutions can immediately:

- Take Continuous API Inventory: Instantly identify and catalog all APIs in your environment including internal, external, third-party and partner APIs. API types include GraphQL, SOAP, HTTP, RESTful, XML-RPC, JSON-RPC, and gRPC, and more.

- Understand API Risk Posture: Traceable provides a security risk score to every API, which allows organizations to determine which APIs are most vulnerable to abuse by collecting data on runtime details such as sensitive data flows, API call maps, API usage behavior, user details, event details, threat activity levels, and more.

- Identify Sensitive Data Exposure: Since APIs potentially expose highly sensitive information, and transmit that data from internal APIs to third-party applications, it is imperative to know the sensitive data flow end-to-end, to understand the level of exposure.

- Benefit from Automatic Conformance Scanning and Analysis: An important part of API discovery and inventory of APIs, is knowing if development specs match the APIs that are implemented in production environments.

This can all be accomplished with Traceable’s flexible data collection and deployment options, including the option of deploying 100 percent on-premise in an air-gapped model, or SaaS, or hosted in your own AWS, GCP, and Azure cloud.