{“lastseen”:”2025-11-21T12:05:10″,”description”:”Can you ever imagine the impact on your business if it went offline on Black Friday or Cyber Monday due to a cyberattack? \\n\\nBlack Friday is the biggest day in the retail calendar. It\u2019s also the riskiest. As you gear up for huge surges in online traffic, ask yourself: have you protected the APIs on which the business runs? \\n\\n## The Black Friday API Boom\\n\\nWhen you think about Black Friday, what images come to mind? Lines of tents and chairs outside malls? Discount-crazed shoppers barging their way past shell-shocked retail workers? \\n\\nWhile these images were once synonymous with the calendar\u2019s biggest commercial event, in reality, Black Friday is now more of an online event than an in-person one. That means the biggest risk to retailers is no longer violence or property destruction; it\u2019s cybercrime.\\n\\nBlack Friday 2025 is expected to be yet another record-breaking year for e-commerce traffic, and APIs will power it all. Your online store depends on APIs. The entire digital shopping experience, from browsing to checkout, relies on APIs. \\n\\nThere are two API risks that practitioners should focus on for Black Friday: compromise and denial of service. \\n\\nBlack Friday is not only an opportunity for shoppers, but for attackers as well. The busiest time of the year is great cover for an attack, especially if that attack involves patterns of behavior that might be obvious at other times, like account takeover attempts. \\n\\nOf course, security and reliability are intertwined, so protecting your APIs from compromise is also ensuring they\u2019re operationally sound. Think about it: what would happen if, as Black Friday begins, your product availability, pricing, shipping, payment, or loyalty programs failed? What impact would that have on your bottom line? Could your business weather that financial storm?\\n\\nHere\u2019s what these questions boil down to: can you afford to leave your APIs unprotected?\\n\\n## Why Attackers Target Retail APIs\\n\\nAPIs \u2013 and retailer APIs in particular \u2013 are a favorite target for attackers. Why? Because not only do they power critical applications; they also expose valuable data. \\n\\nPersonally identifiable information (PII), payment data, session tokens, and more flow through APIs. Attackers want that data. To get it, they\u2019ll exploit a range of attack vectors:\\n\\n * **Broken Authentication****:** Attackers exploit weak login or session controls to take over a customer or admin account. They might abuse this access to change shipping details or access private data. \\n * **Business Logic Abuse****:** Attackers manipulate workflows to exploit business logic vulnerabilities. For example, to repeatedly use a single-use coupon or place orders without payment. \\n * **Injection Attacks****:** Attackers insert malicious code into inputs to access and steal sensitive backend data. \\n * **Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS)****:** Attackers flood APIs with traffic to overwhelm the e-commerce system, making the site unavailable to shopping. \\n\\n\\n\\nAnd we’re not talking hypothetically. In January 2024, Halara, a popular Hong Kong-based clothing retailer suffered an API breach that exposed 941,910 records including first\/last names, phone numbers, home addresses, and locations.\\n\\n## The Cost of an API Breach\\n\\nThe cost of such breaches can be enormous.\\n\\nIf your systems go down, you\u2019ll not only lose sales in the moment, but can even miss out on sales in the years to come. In the mad dash to snag a deal on Black Friday 2026, customers will remember that you didn\u2019t come through for them on Black Friday 2025 or any other day, for that matter. Essentially, you\u2019ll have betrayed their trust, and they\u2019ll make you pay for that. \\n\\nBut the financial consequences can go far beyond just lost sales. If an attack on your APIs exposes sensitive data, you\u2019ll likely be subject to serious regulatory penalties, such as those from PCI and GDPR. \\n\\nAgain, take a moment to consider whether your business could recover from this kind of situation. Maybe, with a bit of elbow grease, you\u2019d be able to make up for lost sales. Maybe you have enough money in your coffers to deal with a regulatory fine. But could you deal with both at the same time? \\n\\n## Pre\u2013Black Friday API Security Checklist\\n\\nNow is the time to prepare. Use this quick checklist to evaluate where you stand on API security before the Black Friday traffic surge hits.\\n\\n**Category**| **Readiness Questions**| **Why It Matters** \\n—|—|— \\n**API Inventory**| \u2022 Do you have a complete, up-to-date inventory of all APIs? \\n\u2022 Have shadow, orphaned, or deprecated APIs been identified? \\n\u2022 Do you know which APIs are externally exposed?| Unseen APIs are the easiest entry point for attackers. You can\u2019t protect what you can\u2019t see. \\n**Monitoring \\u0026 Detection**| \u2022 Do you have continuous monitoring in place? \\n\u2022 Can you detect anomalies, abuse patterns, and active attacks in real time? \\n\u2022 Is alerting automated and 24\/7?| Threats don\u2019t wait for business hours \u2014 attackers target peak shopping windows. \\n**Authentication \\u0026 Access Control**| \u2022 Are your APIs protected with strong authentication and authorization controls? \\n\u2022 Are rate limits and quotas properly configured for high-traffic periods? \\n\u2022 Are sensitive endpoints locked down?| Weak auth and unlimited access are the main drivers of API abuse, account takeover, and overload. \\n**API Testing \\u0026 Validation**| \u2022 Have your APIs been tested for logic flaws, broken authentication, and injection risks? \\n\u2022 Do you run regular security tests in pre-production and production? \\n\u2022 Are partner APIs and integrations validated?| Logic-level vulnerabilities often bypass traditional security tools and become high-impact breaches. \\n**Automation \\u0026 Resilience**| \u2022 Can you automatically block attacks at scale? \\n\u2022 Is your incident response automated for common attack scenarios? \\n\u2022 Can your security layer scale with Black Friday traffic?| Manual response doesn\u2019t survive high-volume attacks. Automation = uptime and revenue protection. \\n \\nIf you want to make this checklist even easier, Wallarm brings all of these checks \u2014 visibility, monitoring, protection, and automation \u2014 into one unified platform to help retailers stay secure during the year\u2019s biggest shopping weekend.\\n\\n## How Wallarm Helps Retailers Stay Secure\\n\\nOn Black Friday, of all days, your API security should be a priority. You need protection that can keep pace with the chaos. Wallarm does exactly that, without exhausting your team. \\n\\n * **Unified protection:** Retailers juggle a complex mix of APIs: old, new, mobile, partner-facing, and more. Wallarm puts all of them under one security umbrella so you don\u2019t get blindsided by forgotten endpoints. \\n * **AI that detects and blocks complex attacks:** Wallarm inspects live traffic, spots malicious behavior, and blocks it on the fly. Our AI learns each APIs normal patterns, meaning it can block attacks without needing signatures of human intervention. \\n * **Automatic****discovery****and risk scoring:** Every retailer has shadow APIs. Wallarm surfaces them, ranks their risk, and shows you where you\u2019re exposed. \\n * **Built for traffic surges:** Black Friday sends traffic through the roof. Wallarm scales with it so your security layer never becomes a bottleneck. \\n * **Real-time visibility into API abuse and vulnerabilities:** Wallarm surfaces live attacks, suspicious behavior, and exposed API risks instantly, so your team sees issues the moment they emerge – not after damage is done.\\n\\n\\n\\nKeep your APIs secure this Black Friday. \\n\\nThe post APIs Are the Retail Engine: How to Secure Them This Black Friday appeared first on Wallarm.”,”published”:”2025-11-21T12:00:00″,”modified”:”2025-11-21T12:00:00″,”type”:”wallarmlab”,”title”:”APIs Are the Retail Engine: How to Secure Them This Black Friday”,”source”:””,”references”:””,”id”:”WALLARMLAB:6A7B830949C5A246D41DC259303F2C6D”,”bulletinFamily”:”blog”,”cwe”:null,”cvelist”:[],”sourceData”:””,”sourceHref”:””,”cvss”:{“score”:0,”severity”:”NONE”,”vector”:”NONE”,”version”:”NONE”},”cvss2″:{},”cvss3″:{“version”:””,”vectorString”:””,”baseScore”:0,”baseSeverity”:””,”attackVector”:””,”attackComplexity”:””,”privilegesRequired”:””,”userInteraction”:””,”scope”:””,”confidentialityImpact”:””,”integrityImpact”:””,”availabilityImpact”:””,”cvssV3″:{“version”:””,”vectorString”:””,”baseScore”:0,”baseSeverity”:””,”attackVector”:””,”attackComplexity”:””,”privilegesRequired”:””,”userInteraction”:””,”scope”:””,”confidentialityImpact”:””,”integrityImpact”:””,”availabilityImpact”:””}},”href”:”https:\/\/lab.wallarm.com\/apis-are-the-retail-engine-how-to-secure-them-this-black-friday\/”,”category_name”:”News”,”post_link”:””,”product”:””,”version”:””,”vendor”:””,”ai_description”:””,”ai_severity”:””,”ai_vendor”:””,”ai_product”:””,”ai_version”:””,”ai_score”:0}<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
{“lastseen”:”2025-11-21T12:05:10″,”description”:”Can you ever imagine the impact on your business if it went offline on Black Friday or Cyber Monday due to a cyberattack? \\n\\nBlack Friday…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[6,8,12,13,33,7,11,5,105],"class_list":["post-27183","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-category_news","tag-cve","tag-cvss","tag-exploit","tag-news","tag-none","tag-security","tag-tapic","tag-vulnerability","tag-wallarmlab"],"yoast_head":"\n