Topic starter
19/08/2026 3:47 pm
TL;DR: Real API tests found 900 cases of missing authentication, 300 injection issues, 200 BOLA instances, and 140 flawed JWT validations, showing that basic access control and input handling failures still dominate API risk, according to Pynt. Shift-left testing matters because these weaknesses become far more expensive once they reach production.
Editorial analysis by NHI Mgmt Group, based on content published by Pynt: “Unveiling the Top API Security Vulnerabilities”.
Key questions
Q: What breaks when an API endpoint does not require authentication?
A: When an API endpoint does not require authentication, every control that depends on knowing the caller becomes unreliable.
A: They let requests succeed even when the application should enforce tenant separation or object ownership.
Q: How do teams know if API security testing is actually effective?
A: Look for coverage of realistic workflows, successful reuse of returned values, and findings that map to business operations instead of only parameter errors.
Practitioner guidance
- Enforce authentication on every API route Create a route-level inventory and block releases where any externally reachable endpoint lacks an explicit authentication requirement.
- Test object-level authorisation for every identifier Probe each endpoint with altered object IDs, account numbers, and resource handles to confirm the API checks ownership and entitlement per request.
- Validate JWTs against strict trust rules Require signature, issuer, audience, expiry, and allowed-algorithm checks in every protected service, and reject tokens that pass parsing but fail policy.
Bottom line: API vulnerabilities in this analysis are dominated by basic trust failures, especially missing authentication, BOLA, injection, and flawed JWT validation.
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19/08/2026 4:24 pm
API access control failures remain a first-order governance problem: missing authentication and BOLA are not advanced attack chains, they are basic boundary failures that let attackers use legitimate request paths to reach data they should never see. That is why API security belongs in the same control conversation as IAM, not only application testing. Organisations that treat API checks as late-stage QA will keep discovering the same authorisation gaps too late. Practitioners should govern API access as a core identity and application control.
A few things that frame the scale:
- Secrets management is a top five cybersecurity priority for only 33% of organisations, behind cloud security (45%), API security (42%), and endpoint security (36%), according to the 2024 State of Secrets Management Survey.
- 71% of organizations use third-party APIs, according to Gartner’s 2024 data.
A question worth separating out:
Q: What is the difference between authentication and authorisation in REST API security?
A: Authentication verifies who is calling the API, while authorisation determines what that caller is allowed to do. An API can authenticate a user or service and still be insecure if permissions are too broad. Strong REST API security needs both, because identity proof alone does not prevent overexposure, privilege abuse, or access to resources beyond the intended scope.
👉 Read our full editorial: API security vulnerabilities are still exposing access control gaps