Topic starter
25/06/2026 5:04 pm
TL;DR: Shadow APIs and zombie APIs expand attack surface because they sit outside normal review, inventory, and offboarding processes, while 137% growth in API-targeting attacks in 2023 underscores the risk, according to Entro Security. The governance problem is not visibility alone but lifecycle control over API access and authentication secrets.
Editorial analysis by NHI Mgmt Group, based on content published by Entro Security: “Shadow API , Zombie API – Effective Detection and Extermination”.
By the numbers:
- cyberattacks targeting APIs have surged by 137% in 2023 compared to the year before
Key questions
Q: What breaks when shadow or zombie APIs are not in the approved inventory?
A: Governance breaks first because teams lose the ability to assign ownership, review access, and retire credentials on schedule.
Q: Why do forgotten APIs create more risk than a simple visibility gap?
A: Because visibility is only useful if it leads to revocation.
Q: How can security teams tell whether an API is truly retired?
A: A retired API should fail closed, with credentials revoked, authorization removed, and monitoring showing no legitimate traffic.
Practitioner guidance
- Map all externally reachable APIs to an owner and lifecycle state Require every API to have a named owner, a deprecation state, and a retirement date so shadow and zombie endpoints do not fall outside governance.
- Bind API secrets to endpoint retirement When an API is deprecated, revoke its keys, tokens, and JWT signing trust at the same time, rather than leaving credentials active after the interface is abandoned.
- Inventory APIs with continuous monitoring and anomaly detection Use continuous monitoring to flag endpoints that are not in the approved inventory or that show unexpected usage patterns after deprecation.
Bottom line: Shadow and zombie APIs persist because lifecycle control, not just discovery, is missing from many identity and API security programmes.
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This topic was modified 1 day ago by NHI Mgmt Group
25/06/2026 5:33 pm
Shadow and zombie APIs are an identity governance failure, not just a discovery problem. Discovery tells teams what exists, but governance determines whether the endpoint still deserves trust. If an API can still authenticate, the real issue is that ownership, offboarding, and access review have not kept pace with the architecture. The practitioner conclusion is simple: unmanaged interfaces must be governed as identity-bearing assets, not just technical leftovers.
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.
- The average estimated time to remediate a leaked secret is 27 days, despite 75% of organisations expressing strong confidence in their secrets management capabilities, according to the State of Secrets in AppSec.
A question worth separating out:
Q: When should organisations treat API keys and tokens as NHI assets?
A: They should do so whenever those credentials can authenticate software, services, or external integrations without human interaction. At that point, the credential has a lifecycle, an owner, and a blast radius that must be governed like any other non-human identity.
👉 Read our full editorial: Shadow and zombie APIs expose the NHI governance gap
This post was modified 1 day ago by NHI Mgmt Group