The Haunted House of APIs - The Haunted Web of APIs with Richard Bird
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Hello, listeners. Today, we are releasing another episode for Cybersecurity Awareness Month as part of our series, The Haunted House of APIs, sponsored by our friends, Traceable. In this series, we are building awareness around APIs, their security risks, and what you can do about it. Traceable AI is building one platform to secure every API so you can discover, protect, and test all your APIs with contextual security, enabling organizations to minimize risk and maximize the value APIs bring to their customers. Today's episode is titled The Haunted Web, Navigating API Sprawl and Creepy Crawlers with Traceable's Chief Security Officer, Richard Byrd. As organizations scale and evolve, so does the complexity of their APIs. The uncontrolled expansion of APIs creates a tangled web where vulnerabilities linger in the shadows. These unseen APIs become creepy crawlers of your digital infrastructure, creeping through your systems and posing security risks.
Richard will discuss how unmanaged and undocumented APIs contribute to blind spots, the risks they create for organizations, and the best strategies for securing a sprawling ecosystem. Well, Richard, thank you for being on the show today. It's great to be here. Before we jump into our topic for today, which is the haunted web, navigating API sprawl and creepy crawlers, tell me and my audience a little bit more about you.
I'm a longtime technologist, 30 years this year. I don't feel that old. I'm the chief security officer for Traceable, and I've been in the startup and solution side for about six years now. I spent more than 24 years in the corporate world where I was executive a number of different things. All I like to say is it took me 25 years of work in the corporate world to become an overnight sensation in the startup world. So if you're willing to put the work in for a quarter of a century, you can be recognized for being good at almost anything. I met my now wife about eight years ago. We looked at each other and said we both love music. I had been a young dad, so I hadn't been in the music scene for 25 years. In fact, I always like to tell people I saw Red Hot Chili Peppers in Columbus, Ohio in 1985 or 86. We looked at each other and said, who are we going to go see? And that's like asking your spouse, where are you going to go to dinner? And we looked at each other and said, have you ever been to a music festival? He said, no.
We're some 55 music festivals later now. So that for me is fun, number one. Fun number two is hopping in our van and going to any national park, going to any trailhead and hiking for as long as we're able to and hiking back out. I keep myself busy.
Well, awesome. Let's dive into our topic today. Again, the title is The Haunted Web, Navigating API Sprawl and Creepy Crawlers. So what is API Sprawl and why is it such a significant security challenge for organizations?
I think if you want to know what API sprawl is, and we're going to stay thematic with the creepy crawlers, watch The Last of Us, a virus, a thing propagating out of control and representing a threat to everybody. When we look at APIs, in the last dozen years, APIs have been used to create massive amounts of business value, but with very little to no security oversight. The reason for that historically is that the goal was to find ways to get applications, particularly in the cloud, to communicate with each other without having to build all of these really heavy integration points that we used to do back in the old data center and application days. And so as soon as folks realized how they could use those APIs, they started doing it like crazy, right?
And they didn't have any security tools. They didn't have any guidance. An example of this is you can walk into any large company today and there'll be 30 organizations within that company that are developing APIs. And they're not using any standard protocols. They're using GraphQL. They're using SOAP. They're using REST. They're using all of these different language types.
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