USE CASE

Preventing Sensitive Data Exposure

Protect sensitive data across APIs, applications, and agentic AI — without slowing innovation.

The rapid growth of applications and APIs has accelerated data sharing across internal and external systems, but it has also increased the risk of exposing sensitive information. Organizations must implement safeguards that prevent leakage without hindering business operations. Protecting sensitive data is essential for meeting regulatory and compliance mandates, enforcing privacy policies, and preserving customer trust.

Agentic AI Raises the Stakes

Unlike traditional applications, autonomous AI agents can initiate actions, chain API calls, and interact with third-party systems without direct human oversight. This autonomy expands the attack surface and increases the risk of inadvertent data exposure.

Organizations can harness the power of agentic AI without sacrificing data security by using:

Context-aware controls
Least-privilege access
Dynamic masking or tokenization
Continuous monitoring of agent activity

The Risks of Exposure

The impacts of sensitive data exposure extend far beyond immediate technical risks. It can also fuel further attacks such as phishing, identity theft, and credential abuse, creating a cycle of ongoing exploitation. The OWASP API Security Top 10 includes sensitive data exposure as part of API3 – Broken Object Property Level Authorization.

How Cequence Prevents Sensitive Data Exposure

Cequence API Security, a core component of the Unified API Protection (UAP) platform, uses a network-based approach to discovering APIs and data flows, with deep packet inspection that enables identifying sensitive data and potentially masking it or blocking exfiltration.

Identification

Cequence identifies predefined expressions in API payloads and customers can configure custom regular expressions for values to be masked specific to their business. Sensitive data use cases could include health information, financial information such as such as credit card numbers, and personal information such as social security numbers and physical addresses.

Masking

Cequence provides data masking capabilities that protect sensitive information from unintended exposure at the API layer. Organizations can include or exclude specific fields for masking based on parameter names within the API payload, enabling precision targeting of sensitive data. Masking is performed with Format Preserving Encryption (FPE), enabling the data to retain semantic similarity to the original values, preserving downstream functionality such as API specification generation, sensitive data classification, and behavioral analysis. Learn more about Cequence’s data masking.

Prevention

Cequence can also block unintended sensitive data exposure. Organizations can create policies from predefined or custom expressions to prevent sensitive data from leaving an API and the network. Cequence’s network-based approach and native mitigation capabilities ensures protection without relying on third-party tools.

Additional Resources

Sensitive Data Masking in API Security

How BOLA Vulnerabilities Can Expose Sensitive Data

Find out how Cequence can help your organization.

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