API Security (Shadow APIs) – Himanshu Dwivedi – ASW #181
It is hard, if not impossible, to secure something you don’t know exists. While security professionals spend countless hours on complex yet interesting issues that may be exploitable in the future, basic attacks are occurring every day against flaws in code that receives little review. For example, a “dated trend” by effective yet lazy hackers is to search for APIs unknown by security teams, coined “Shadow APIs”, then connect to these APIs and extract data. SQL Injection used to be the hack of choice, as a few simple SQL commands would either mean pay dirt or “move on to the next target”. Now the same can be said for Shadow API: Find, Connect, Extract. Himanshu will discuss one of many methods that are used in the wild to target Shadow APIs and export large volumes of data with a few clicks of a button or a few lines of code in Python.
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Guest
Himanshu Dwivedi is the CEO of Data Theorem, Inc., an application security company focusing on API Security (RESTful & GraphQL), mobile apps (iOS &Android), Cloud Apps (Serverless), and Single Page WebApps (SPAs). Himanshu has been an avid start-up entrepreneur since 1999, where he and 3 friends started the west coast office of @stake, an information security firm that was later acquired by Symantec. In 2004, Himanshu co-founded iSEC Partners, an application security company that was acquired by the NCC Group in 2010. Himanshu has several publications, including six different books (Mobile Application Security, Hacking VoIP, Hacking Exposed: Web 2.0, Hacker’s Challenge 3, Storage Security, and Implementing SSH) as well as the owner of one patent (Patent number 7849504). He has also presented at numerous conferences, including 6-time BlackHat speaker. Himanshu received a B.S. from the Carlson School of Management (University of Minnesota), where he was awarded the Tomato Can Loving Cup Award, which is given to the school’s top graduating student.