Telecom API Security: Shadow API Protected in Less Than 30 Minutes

Today’s blog highlights how an existing telecom API security customer was able to discover and protect a shadow API that was under attack in less than 30 minutes. Highlighting a common theme of rapid-time-to-value, this customer benefited from the Cequence approach to bot protection that eliminates the cumbersome SDK or JavaScript integration requirement. Agentless bot prevention with API Spartan is enabled by CQAI, a multi-dimensional machine learning engine that accurately models and detects the attacker eco-system – even when cybercriminals retool to avoid detection.

Why API Security is a Big Deal for Large Enterprises

What customers realize is a highly streamlined onboarding process that brings immediate time-to-value API protection for their critical applications, eliminating software integration, eliminating page load delays and forced mobile app updates. Contrast this to other security vendors that can take weeks to months to onboard API protection for a single API endpoint, leaving the door open for attackers to continue to conduct attack campaigns.

Protection in Under 30 minutes

At this telecom provider, cybercriminals were attacking a critical API endpoint that had not yet been protected by API Spartan, a component of Cequence’s UAP (Unified API Protection) solution. A member of the application development team responsible for this API had contacted the security team about this API that was under attack. They requested immediate assistance to quickly onboard API protection to mitigate the targeted attacks. The security team had jumped on protecting this API by implementing protection in under 30 minutes, configuring blocking policies that stopped the attacks right in their tracks. More importantly, 25 of these 30 minutes were spent on a conference call to plan and strategize. Cequence was up, running and protecting critical assets in minutes.

API Spartan: A component of Cequence UAP

A Comparison in Contrasts

This highlights another example of a customer that has taken advantage of Cequence’s unique approach to API protection. When API Spartan was first deployed at this telecom customer, thousands of APIs and web apps were onboarded within a matter of weeks. This contrasted with the previous API security vendor, which took 18 months to onboard a single API due to the extensive software integration and QA cycles required to integrate the vendor’s instrumentation. Because of this and despite their best efforts – they had only onboarded 13 API applications with a serious backlog of unprotected applications. With API Spartan, they could move extremely fast to onboard unprotected APIs in a matter of minutes, ensuring that they could quickly respond to the security needs of the organization.

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