API Protection

Over 60% of companies have more than 400 APIs, and APIs make up more than 80% of web traffic. Translation: APIs are a giant gateway for attacks on web-enabled apps. And it's not just the size of the gateway that's concerning — it's APIs' increasing vulnerability, as adoption spreads well beyond skilled developers and attracts ever more attackers.

The techniques adversaries most commonly use to abuse APIs:

• Scraping — bots collect sensitive information such as customer data, financial data, and intellectual property
• Brute-force attacks — bots overwhelm APIs to guess passwords, access tokens, and other credentials
• Denial of service — high-volume requests render APIs unavailable to legitimate users
• Exploitation and fraud — bots create fake accounts, spam, and more

Add shadow and zombie APIs, plus volumetric attacks against endpoints with no rate limiting, and the glaring problem becomes clear: traditional bot management solutions can't effectively counter crafty adversaries.

From your revenue to your customer experience to your very brand itself, API threats have a range of harmful effects:

• Large cost of having private data exposed
• Poor app performance and experience
• Loss of customers
• Expensive regulatory fines
• Damage to your reputation and brand equity

Traditional bot management vendors fail for two reasons. First, they let bots enter your infrastructure before blocking them, and their static defenses take too long to learn and adapt — needing manual tuning, resources, and time. Every delay is a window of opportunity for attackers.

Second, they rely on first-generation "fingerprinting": constructing an identifier from unique client data. The anti-tracking movement keeps changing browsers underneath it, and attackers can replay legitimate fingerprint data to trick detection outright.

Blockdash instead looks for immutable evidence whenever tools interact with your APIs, and its dynamic detection adapts as quickly as attackers retool — backed by deep threat intelligence. An invisible proof-of-work challenge exponentially raises the difficulty of each abusive request over time, sapping adversaries' CPU and money without tipping them off. The results: the immediate attack is neutralized, replay attacks are prevented, and future attempts are deterred.

When you make attacks too expensive, attackers look elsewhere. When threats can't retool, they aren't threats at all.