Last updated: May 1, 2026
HARD
🔐 PRO
⏱ 120 min
Module 8 of 8
What you’ll learn
- The OWASP API Top 10 (2023, revised for 2025) in practical depth
- Why APIs carry more commercial risk than UIs in 2026
- REST vs GraphQL vs gRPC testing methodologies
- SSRF, resource exhaustion, shadow APIs, and unsafe upstream consumption
- LLM-integrated API testing — the new 2026 attack surface
Prerequisites: Modules 1–7.
In 2026, the API is the product. Modern web applications are thin clients (browser, mobile app, third-party integration) over APIs that carry all the business logic. This means APIs carry all the commercial risk — and in pentest findings, APIs produce the overwhelming majority of high-severity bugs.
Web pentesting that stops at the frontend misses most of the real vulnerabilities. This module covers the API-specific attack surface using the OWASP API Security Top 10 as the framework, with the 2026 additions that matter (LLM-integrated APIs, event-driven patterns, gRPC).
Why API testing differs from web-app testing
- The UI hides most of the attack surface. An API has dozens of endpoints the frontend never hits.
- Authorization bugs are more common and more severe in APIs.
- Rate limiting and resource consumption issues are more impactful (cloud costs, DoS).
- Multi-tenant boundary violations produce cleaner findings.
- Supply-chain concerns — consuming third-party APIs introduces unsafe-consumption attack vectors.
Custom team training + practitioner advisory
Beyond the free academy — we run private workshops, vCISO advisory, and red-team exercises tailored to your stack. For Indian SMBs scaling past their first hire.