INDUSTRY
Application and API Security for Government and Public Sector
Unified application security for public sector and government API protection, from discovery through compliance to real-time defense.
Why Are Governments a Primary Target for Application and API Attacks?
As governments continue their digital transformation push, it brings both incredible opportunities and challenges. Applications can be built rapidly using APIs as the connective tissue that stitches application components together. However, this can increase application complexity, enabling cybercriminals to discover critical vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and sensitive data exposure within mission-critical applications. This can be especially serious when government agencies share sensitive data over managed, unmanaged, and shadow APIs. This can make them a primary target for cybercriminals. It also makes application security for public sector agencies a mission-critical discipline rather than a compliance exercise.
As governments continue their digital transformation push, it brings both incredible opportunities and challenges. Applications can be built rapidly using APIs as the connective tissue that stitches application components together. However, this can increase application complexity, enabling cybercriminals to discover critical vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and sensitive data exposure within mission-critical applications. This can be especially serious when government agencies share sensitive data over managed, unmanaged, and shadow APIs. This can make them a primary target for cybercriminals. It also makes application security for public sector agencies a mission-critical discipline rather than a compliance exercise.
By the Numbers
Application Security for Public Sector Agencies at Every Level
Application security for public sector organizations is not one problem. A federal civilian agency, a statewide benefits system and a county services portal all expose citizen data through APIs, but they answer to different mandates, budgets and staffing realities. Cequence protects applications and APIs across all of them from a single platform.
- Federal agencies: high volume citizen-facing applications and inter-agency data exchange, where federal government API security requirements and authorization boundaries shape every decision.
- State and local government: benefits, licensing, tax and permitting portals built quickly on APIs, often by small teams with no dedicated application security function.
- Public education and research: identity and records systems that attract credential stuffing, scraping and account takeover at scale.
- Defense and public safety: mission systems where least privilege access and zero trust are not negotiable.
Application Security and API Protection for Government and Public Sector
Threat actors continue to target government agencies. Cequence solves critical application security and API protection use cases that are a top concern for government agencies through the Cequence Platform.
Fraud Prevention for Government Applications and APIs
Cybercriminals look for ways to gain unauthorized access to API applications and commit fraud. This can impact users’ confidence in using government API applications and storing their personal information online. Government agencies need to accurately detect and block fraudulent activity with very low false positives, ensuring that fraud never compromises stored government and user data.
Zero-Trust Government API Security
Government agencies require the highest level of security. In order to achieve zero trust government API security, agencies must ensure that every user only has access to the data that they are entitled to access. Least privilege restricts users to only access data they are authorized for within an API application, keeping your sensitive data safe.
Privacy and PII Protection for Public Sector APIs
Government agencies carry a lot of personally identifiable information (PII) that needs to be protected at all costs. Exploiting API vulnerabilities can allow attackers to access internal portals, remotely take over user accounts and access personal user information. Detecting and remediating sensitive data exposure can ensure that user privacy and PII is always protected against malicious actors seeking to compromise sensitive data. Effective API protection for public sector agencies starts with knowing exactly where that data flows and which interfaces expose it.
Cost Savings
The cloud is expensive. A high volume automated ATO or volumetric attack against an API without any resource or rate limiting (OWASP API#4) protection can cause cloud costs to skyrocket. The accurate detection and blocking of automated attacks can ensure that a government agency’s API applications are never overwhelmed by attacks, enabling users to continue to have uninterrupted access while saving on infrastructure costs.
Limitations of Traditional Application and API Defenses
Today’s security teams simply lack the visibility and defense capabilities they need to protect the ever-growing risk from APIs and other application connections. Many have adopted a belief that compliance with PCI or SOC 2 guidelines combined with a shift-left, DevOps mentality supported by existing security technologies is sufficient to protect APIs. The problem with these strategies is that they don’t have a way to “know the unknown”, meaning they aren’t able to look for all APIs and API vulnerabilities without knowing where to look. Even if all APIs are discovered and “known”, attackers can still leverage seemingly legitimate transactions in an attempt to steal data or commit fraud. Traditional approaches that WAFs or API Gateways depend on easily evadable detection, lack the real-time ability to discern good from bad API activity and are reliant on static, least common denominator protection spread across multiple technology components. For federal government API security teams that blind spot carries a specific cost: an interface that was never inventoried was never inside the boundary the system was authorized against.
Federal Government API Security and Compliance Mandates
Federal government API security sits inside an overlapping set of mandates. FISMA requires agencies and their vendors to implement the controls catalogued in NIST SP 800-53 and to hold an Authorization to Operate before a system goes live. FedRAMP applies that same baseline to cloud services and layers on cloud-specific requirements for continuous monitoring, incident response and supply chain integrity. State and local agencies face parallel expectations through GovRAMP, formerly StateRAMP. Every one of these frameworks assumes the agency already knows which systems and interfaces exist.
That assumption is where most programs break down. An API nobody has inventoried cannot be assessed, authorized or continuously monitored, so shadow and unmanaged APIs sit quietly outside the boundary an authorization was granted against. Government API protection therefore has to begin with continuous discovery, then carry the same evidence forward into testing, authorization and runtime enforcement.
- Continuous inventory for audit readiness: an always-current record of managed, unmanaged and shadow APIs, mapped to the systems they belong to.
- Controls mapped to the frameworks agencies report against: risk rules aligned to recognized regulatory and security frameworks, so findings translate into control evidence instead of a separate reporting exercise.
- Pre-production testing that supports authorization timelines: API testing integrated into development pipelines so risky code is caught before it reaches an authorized environment.
- Runtime evidence rather than point-in-time scans: continuous detection and real-time blocking that speaks to continuous monitoring expectations, not an annual assessment snapshot.
Cequence Secures Applications and APIs for Government and Public Sector
Cequence Security believes in taking a holistic approach to defending against API-related data risk with a market-defining solution that goes beyond API security approaches that may focus solely on one aspect of the API protection journey.
Discovery: Viewing an organization’s API attack surface from a threat actor perspective to know the unknown.
Inventory: Performing a comprehensive multi-cloud API inventory, including all existing APIs and connections.
Testing: Integrating API protection into development, which shifts API security left within the organization, so risky code doesn’t go live.
Compliance: Keeping APIs in compliance with specifications, standards and regulations such as OWASP and ensuring ongoing API governance, including the frameworks federal, state and local agencies are assessed against.
Detection: Continuous scanning for threats, including subtle business logic abuse, fraud, and automated malicious activity from bots.
Prevention: Employing countermeasures such as alerts, real-time blocking, deception, without the need for added third-party data security tools.
Why Cequence?
With the Cequence Platform, government and public sector customers can continue to reap the competitive and business advantages of ubiquitous API connectivity. The Cequence solution results in attack futility, failure, and fatigue for even the most relentless of attackers. It significantly improves visibility and protection while reducing cost, minimizing fraud, business abuse, data losses and non-compliance.
