Application programming interfaces (APIs) have become the backbone of many modern applications. However, without proper protection, they can be vulnerable to a variety of cyber threats, including unauthorized access, data breaches, and denial-of-service attacks. Attackers can exploit unprotected endpoints to inject malicious code, steal sensitive data, or disrupt service availability. The consequences of insecure API endpoints can range from data breaches to full-scale service downtime, costing companies both financially and reputationally. Endpoint protection is an important concept that helps to safeguard APIs from these threats. Endpoint protection software helps to prevent unauthorized access, data theft, and other malicious activities.
In this article, we’ll explore the top software solutions for endpoint protection, and discuss their features and considerations to help you select the most suitable solution for your organization’s specific needs.
What Is Endpoint Protection?
Endpoint protection is a security strategy designed to safeguard API endpoints. These endpoints are the entry points through which applications and systems interact with each other. By protecting API endpoints, organizations can prevent unauthorized access, data breaches, and other security threats.
Endpoint protection involves implementing various security measures, including authentication, encryption, and rate limiting, to safeguard these access points. The goal is to prevent unauthorized access, ensure data integrity, and protect the overall functionality of the API. In modern architectures, especially with the rise of microservices and distributed systems, securing API endpoints has become more complex, requiring a range of specialized tools and techniques to mitigate the growing number of threats.
Key components of endpoint protection for APIs include:
- Authentication and Authorization: Limiting API access to just authorized users and systems.
- Encryption: Securing data transmission between users and systems.
- Rate Limiting and Throttling: Controlling traffic to stop DoS attacks and API misuse.
- Input Validation: Ensuring that all data going into the API is cleaned up to prevent injection attacks.
Importance of Endpoint Protection
API endpoint protection is essential for protecting your organization’s data, systems, and reputation against cyberattacks. Here’s why:
- Data Protection: Prevents unauthorized access to sensitive data transmitted via APIs, protecting it from exposure or theft.
- Threat Prevention: Detects and prevents harmful activity against API endpoints, such as injection attacks, DDoS attacks, and unauthorized access.
- Compliance: Ensures compliance with industry requirements such as GDPR and PCI DSS, which need strong API security measures.
- Mitigating Financial Risks: Effective endpoint protection helps to prevent financial losses (including legal fees, fines, and damage control costs) by preventing breaches before they occur, hence avoiding potential financial consequences.
- Enhancing User Trust: By securing API endpoints, organizations are demonstrating their commitment to protecting users’ information and privacy.
- Business Continuity: Reduces disruptions caused by API security breaches while protecting revenue and reputation.
By implementing effective API endpoint protection, you can mitigate the risks associated with API vulnerabilities and safeguard your organization’s critical assets.
What Is Endpoint Protection Software?
Endpoint protection software secures the interfaces through which applications and services interact with each other. These software solutions provide security measures specifically tailored to protect API endpoints from various types of cyber threats and attacks. This prevents unauthorized access, data breaches, and other malicious activities.
Endpoint protection software is essential for addressing emerging security threats and maintaining a robust security posture. It helps organizations ensure compliance with industry standards, protect valuable business assets, and enhance operational efficiency by providing automated, real-time defenses against potential risks.
Key Features and Functionalities of Endpoint Protection Software
- Authentication and Authorization: Includes verifying the identity of users or applications before allowing access to API resources.
- Rate Limiting: Prevents excessive API consumption, which could result in denial-of-service attacks or resource exhaustion.
- API Key Management: Involves managing and securing API keys to control access to API endpoints.
- Data Encryption: Involves protecting sensitive data transmitted through APIs using encryption algorithms.
- Threat Detection and Prevention: Identifies and prevents potential threats including SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), and API abuse.
- Security Auditing and Logging: Includes tracking API usage, recognizing security incidents, and creating audit trails for compliance purposes.
Organizations may significantly reduce the risk of attacks while also protecting their important data and systems by setting up strong API endpoint protection mechanisms.
4 Best Endpoint Protection Software in 2025
When securing API endpoints, choosing the right protection software is essential. Below are some of the best solutions available.
#1. SentinelOne
SentinelOne is a leading endpoint protection platform that protects devices and APIs against advanced cyber threats. It’s known for its independent, AI-powered approach. This tool provides real-time threat detection and response as well as complete security for endpoints, APIs, and cloud workloads, making it a great choice for organizations wishing to strengthen their API infrastructures.
SentinelOne uses machine learning and behavioral AI to detect and neutralize malicious activities before they escalate into severe issues, providing full visibility across networks and endpoints. To explore its core capabilities further, check out this guided tour of SentinelOne.
Platform at a Glance
- Singularity™ AI SIEM extends protection from endpoint devices to networks, identities, cloud environments, and other managed surfaces. This ensures an integrated approach for each and every critical component of your enterprise’s digital infrastructure from the large array of threats. Be it a laptop, server, cloud instance, or network component, cohesive security coverage is offered by the platform.
- Singularity™ Identity brings real-time features for identity security. Its deception-based offerings help prevent unauthorized access to endpoints through credential misuse. The tool helps the XDR platform to defend the Active Directory by misdirecting attackers with fake data.
- Singularity™ Network Discovery is there to map networks with the help of pre-built agents. The agents use active probes or can also passively observe communication between devices for any vulnerability detection. Using this, the XDR platform can get instant information that can help detect and neutralize any rogue elements in the network. Without requiring any external hardware or third-party software, the tool strengthens XDR’s efforts in detecting unauthorized devices and protecting sensitive assets.
- Singularity™ Endpoint stands out with its incident response via automation. It can quickly perform threat isolation and remediate it without requiring manual intervention. By providing automated responses to quarantine compromised files and blocking malicious activities, Singularity™ Endpoint minimizes the potential impact of security incidents. It accelerates recovery for your team to focus on strategic initiatives rather than reacting to threats. Centralize remote management of your fleet using SentinelOne’s one console. You can expedite investigations, streamline vulnerability and configuration management, and secure unmanaged endpoints.
Features:
- AI-Powered Threat Detection: Uses machine learning algorithms to identify zero-day vulnerabilities, malware, ransomware, and Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs).
- Automated Remediation and Response: Simplifies the threat response process by isolating, mitigating, and rolling back compromised systems, hence removing manual intervention.
- API Security Integration: Provides full API protection, preventing exploits and illegal access while ensuring data integrity.
- Real-Time Analytics: Provides real-time analytics and monitoring capabilities to enable visibility into endpoint behavior and threats.
- Ransomware Prevention: Built-in ransomware security prevents attacks from occurring at various stages by stopping execution, isolating endpoints, and automatically restoring systems.
- Cloud-Native Protection: Provides cloud-based security, making it suited for hybrid and multi-cloud systems. It secures both traditional endpoints and cloud workloads.
- Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR): Offers a strong EDR tool that monitors threats across the network, allowing for speedy and effective responses.
Core Problems That SentinelOne Eliminates:
- Zero-Day Threats: SentinelOne, driven by its AI-powered approach, also has the power to hunt down and neutralize previously unknown threats against organizations that may have a weakness in zero-day vulnerabilities.
- Manual Threat Containment: SentinelOne automates threat detection and remediation, freeing the security team to work on strategic initiatives rather than take the time required for manual interventions.
- Unifying Security Management: The unified console makes security operations all that much simpler. It cuts down on the complexity associated with keeping track of several different security tools out there and generally raises efficiency.
- Limited Visibility: Provides deep visibility into endpoint activities and thus enables the organization to understand and fix all the potential security gaps across the network.
#2. Salt Security
Salt Security is a major provider of API security and helps organizations protect their APIs from a wide range of threats, such as unauthorized access, data breaches, and API abuse. This platform has broad capabilities for API discovery, inventory, security, and monitoring. Salt
Security specializes in detecting misconfigurations, old or deprecated APIs, and logic errors that may go undetected during development. Salt Security enables enterprises to protect their digital assets and sensitive data by delivering continuous API security across the full life cycle, maintaining the integrity of their API ecosystems.
Features:
- Automated API Discovery and Inventory: Automatically identifies and catalogs APIs within an organization.
- Runtime Protection: Monitors API traffic in real-time and detects and blocks suspicious activity.
- Bot Management: Detects and blocks malicious bot traffic that can target APIs.
- Contextual Security: Provides detailed insights into API traffic, detecting suspicious activities and offering context-aware responses to mitigate threats.
- Web Application Firewall (WAF): Protects APIs from common web application attacks like SQL injection and cross-site scripting.
- API Security Policies: Allows users to create custom policies to enforce specific security rules.
- Integration with DevSecOps Pipelines: Seamlessly integrates into existing CI/CD and DevSecOps pipelines, allowing developers to incorporate security checks throughout the API development lifecycle.
- Comprehensive Analytics: Offers in-depth analytics and reporting tools, giving organizations a clear view of API performance, security incidents, and vulnerabilities.
Check out the PeerSpot reviews to see how Salt Security performs in various enterprise evaluations for endpoint protection.
#3. Cloudflare API Shield
Cloudflare is a cloud security platform that offers API protection. It’s recognized for its global content delivery network (CDN) and DDoS defense. Cloudflare also provides API Shield, a specialized solution meant to protect APIs from a variety of threats.
Cloudflare’s API Shield offers scalable protection with features such as API gateway integration, schema validation, and advanced encryption, making it suitable for developers and security engineers looking to protect their API infrastructure.
Features:
- API Gateway: Acts as a central point of control for managing and securing APIs.
- Rate Limiting: Prevents excessive API usage that could lead to denial-of-service attacks.
- Bot Management: Detects and blocks malicious bot traffic that can target APIs.
- Web Application Firewall (WAF): Protects APIs from common web application attacks like SQL injection and cross-site scripting.
- API Schema Validation: Ensures that incoming API requests comply with the predefined schema to prevent malicious requests or exploits.
- Geo-Blocking: Restricts API access based on geographic location.
- DDoS Protection: With its extensive global network, Cloudflare can mitigate DDoS attacks targeted at API endpoints, ensuring availability even under heavy attacks.
Check out Gartner Peer Insights and TrustRadius reviews to see how developers and security engineers rate its API protection features, usability, and overall performance in real-world scenarios.
#4. Imperva API Security
Imperva is a security platform that offers strong API protection for sensitive data and applications. It’s known for protecting data both on-premises and in the cloud. Imperva’s API security solution detects and prevents API abuse, DDoS attacks, unauthorized access, and injection vulnerabilities.
This platform also seamlessly connects with DevOps workflows, allowing security to be built into the entire development process.
Features:
- API Gateway Security: Imperva’s API Gateway enables the creation, monitoring, and protection of APIs, ensuring secure connections between services and data sources.
- Behavioral Analytics: Analyzes API traffic to identify abnormal behavior that may indicate malicious activity, helping to detect and prevent API abuse.
- Bot Protection: Protects APIs from malicious bot traffic, reducing the risk of automated attacks, scraping, and exploitation of vulnerabilities.
- Web Application Firewall (WAF): Protects APIs from common web application attacks like SQL injection and cross-site scripting.
- Compliance Monitoring: Ensures that APIs comply with industry regulations such as GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI DSS, preventing unauthorized access to sensitive data.
- DDoS Protection: Protects APIs from volumetric attacks that aim to disrupt service availability, offering real-time traffic monitoring and mitigation.
- Attack Detection and Prevention: Utilizes advanced machine learning to detect anomalies in API traffic and block attacks such as injections, cross-site scripting, and credential-based attacks.
Explore Imperva’s Gartner Peer Insights reviews and ratings to find out what users think about the API security features it offers.
What You Should Look for in Endpoint Protection Software?
- Robust Authorization and Authentication: Ensuring that only authorized people or systems can access your API is one of the primary functions of endpoint protection software. Look for tools that support multi-factor authentication (MFA), OAuth, and token-based security measures to provide a secure foundation for access control.
- Threat Detection and Monitoring: Real-time tracking of API traffic is made possible by comprehensive monitoring tools, which also aid in identifying odd patterns, potential risks, and suspicious activity. The software must provide logging and alerting features to guarantee that administrators are informed of any security incidents or abnormalities.
- Flexibility and Scalability: Your protection software ought to be scalable as your API infrastructure expands. Look for solutions that provide consistent protection irrespective of the number of endpoints by providing flexibility in managing security across distributed systems or microservices environments.
- User-Friendly Automation and Interface: A user-friendly interface simplifies management, making it easier to configure security settings and monitor API traffic. Also, automation features such as automated threat detection, response, and patching can save time and enhance security by addressing issues in real-time.
- Integration with Other Security Tools: A layered approach is often used for effective API security. Choose endpoint security software that works seamlessly with other security tools in your ecosystem. This guarantees a more broad approach to protecting your APIs.
- Pricing: The cost of API endpoint protection software varies significantly based on the infrastructure’s size, scalability, and functionality. Evaluate the pricing plan, whether it’s pay-as-you-go, subscription-based, or dependent on the quantity of endpoints or API calls. Think about the long-term cost-effectiveness regarding the expansion and budget of your organization.
- Vulnerability Scanning and Patching: Maintaining the security of your API endpoints against known attacks is ensured by regular patching and vulnerability scanning. Look for software that provides quick patch management in addition to automated scanning.
Choosing Endpoint Protection Software
Protecting API endpoints is essential for preserving the functionality and integrity of modern applications. Strong endpoint protection is crucial since the risk of API-based attacks has increased due to the complexity of digital ecosystems. From preventing data breaches to ensuring compliance with industry standards, endpoint protection software plays a vital role in defending against evolving threats.
When choosing endpoint protection software, consider features like authentication and authorization techniques, access controls, data security, monitoring and logging, scalability, integration, price, licensing, and support. You can opt for a solution that successfully secures your APIs and lowers the risks brought on by cyberattacks by carefully considering these factors.
By putting robust endpoint protection mechanisms in place, developers and security engineers can maintain customer trust, secure vital company assets, and guarantee the dependability of their systems.
FAQs
1. What is the role of endpoint protection in cybersecurity?
Endpoint protection plays an essential role in protecting APIs from malicious attacks, unauthorized access, and data breaches. It protects communication between different services by preventing vulnerabilities in the API layer.
2. Can endpoint protection software protect against all threats?
Endpoint protection software cannot provide complete protection from all threats. Advanced threats, such as zero-day attacks, may still go undetected. However, strong endpoint protection solutions can greatly lower the likelihood of attacks and data breaches.
3. How frequently should endpoint protection software be updated?
Endpoint protection software should be updated regularly to guarantee that it is still effective against the latest threats. Many vendors provide automatic updates, but it is important to check for updates manually as well.
4. How do I choose the right endpoint protection software for my organization?
Consider your organization’s size, device types, budget, and the specific security risks you face. Look for systems that provide a wide range of capabilities, such as real-time threat detection, automated response, and easy management.
5. How is endpoint protection different from traditional antivirus software?
Endpoint protection extends beyond traditional antivirus with advanced threat detection, real-time monitoring, and response. It focuses on protecting against sophisticated attacks such as ransomware, zero-day exploits, and API-level attacks.