Mar 22, 2024

How to Prevent API Abuse

APIs are an important part of the modern business, but their openness and ability to interoperate make them a tempting target for abuse. This can take the form of DoS attacks, injection attacks, data scraping and more. However, it’s possible to prevent API abuse by implementing controls like rate limiting, input validation and logging.

The abuse IP API project crowdsources IP addresses that have been reported as associated with malicious activity on the web and offers a blacklist for system administrators and webmasters. The list contains thousands of reports that are generated each day. The project is free to use and provides both an API for reporting malicious IPs detected on systems and a check API to confirm whether or not an IP has been reported as having been associated with malice online.

Preventing Abuse: Utilizing an Abuse IP API

Wazuh has integrations with VirusTotal, Slack and PagerDuty out of the box and also allows you to create your own custom integration using our integrator tool. Creating an integration involves configuring a Python script that makes calls to an external software product’s API through their respective integration hooks.

For example, to configure an integration with AbuseIPDB you need to create a python script that checks an IP against the AbuseIPDB database. This will return the threat category and a confidence rating for that IP that indicates how confident AbuseIPDB is that it has been associated with malicious activities. You can then use this information to create a rule in Wazuh that blocks those IPs.