OWASP API top 10 based API hacking syllabus
β±οΈ Length: 6.1 total hours
β 4.36/5 rating
π₯ 10,648 students
π May 2025 update
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- Course Overview
- Explore the critical importance of API security, the invisible backbone of modern applications and services, in today’s interconnected digital landscape.
- Delve into evolving threat models uniquely targeting APIs, addressing distinct attack surfaces that extend beyond traditional web application vulnerabilities.
- Gain a holistic understanding of how diverse APIs function across various architectural patterns and communication protocols, including both REST and SOAP.
- Immerse yourself in a dynamic, lab-centric learning experience meticulously designed to simulate authentic, real-world API hacking scenarios.
- Position yourself as a highly competent professional, equipped with a recognized certification that unequivocally validates your specialized expertise in this rapidly growing cybersecurity domain.
- Benefit from a cutting-edge curriculum that has been meticulously updated to reflect the latest attack techniques, robust defensive strategies, and prevailing industry best practices as of May 2025.
- Requirements / Prerequisites
- A foundational grasp of networking concepts, particularly the intricate workings of the HTTP protocol, its various methods, status codes, and headers.
- Familiarity with ubiquitous data serialization formats such as JSON and XML, which are crucial for understanding API communication payloads.
- Basic proficiency in utilizing a command-line interface (CLI) for efficient system navigation, executing network utilities, and launching security tools.
- An inherent analytical mindset and strong problem-solving skills, vital for dissecting complex API behavior and uncovering subtle, hidden vulnerabilities.
- Access to a personal computer with sufficient processing power, memory, and administrative rights necessary for setting up various security tools and dedicated lab environments.
- While not strictly mandatory, a conceptual understanding of general programming or scripting languages (e.g., Python, JavaScript) can significantly aid in automation and custom exploit development.
- Skills Covered / Tools Used
- Advanced API Reconnaissance: Master sophisticated techniques for discovering both public and hidden API endpoints, accurately understanding intricate versioning schemes, and comprehensively mapping the entire API attack surface beyond documented routes (e.g., using `dirbuster` or `ffuf` adapted for API paths).
- API Business Logic Exploitation: Develop a keen expertise in identifying and exploiting complex business logic vulnerabilities that are often unique to specific API interactions, potentially leading to unauthorized data access, privilege escalation, or critical data manipulation.
- Bypassing API Security Mechanisms: Learn to creatively circumvent various protective measures such as advanced API rate limits, IP-based restrictions, robust input validation schemes, and common WAF/API Gateway protections.
- Automated API Fuzzing & Brute-Forcing: Gain extensive hands-on experience with specialized tools and methodologies for intelligently fuzzing API parameters, headers, and payloads to uncover elusive edge-case vulnerabilities (e.g., customized `wfuzz` or `ffuf` configurations).
- Containerized Lab Setup & Management: Acquire the crucial expertise to autonomously build, manage, and tear down isolated, reproducible lab environments using virtualization or containerization technologies (e.g., Docker) for secure, consequence-free practice.
- Structured API Threat Modeling: Develop and apply structured approaches to systematically anticipate potential threats to API assets, applying industry-standard frameworks to effectively prioritize risks and inform targeted testing strategies.
- Custom Scripting for Exploitation Automation: Significantly enhance your ability to write bespoke scripts, primarily in Python, to automate repetitive API interactions, efficiently chain multiple vulnerabilities, and craft highly sophisticated exploit payloads.
- Leveraging Interception Proxies for Deep Analysis: Become highly proficient in using leading interception proxies like Burp Suite Professional or OWASP ZAP to meticulously analyze, intercept, modify, and replay API requests and responses, gaining deep insights into API behavior.
- Comprehensive API Vulnerability Reporting: Formulate clear, concise, and highly actionable technical vulnerability reports, effectively communicating complex findings to both technical developers and non-technical stakeholders, including practical remediation advice.
- Dynamic Utilization of OpenAPI/Swagger Specifications: Beyond basic reading and writing, learn to dynamically leverage these API specification formats for automated testing, intelligent attack surface mapping, and even generating custom exploit templates.
- API Gateway & Microservice Security Analysis: Explore how API Gateways function as critical control points in modern architectures and identify potential misconfigurations, authentication bypasses, or vulnerabilities within these crucial infrastructure components.
- Benefits / Outcomes
- Achieve CAPIE Certification & Recognition: Successfully earn a valuable and industry-recognized certification that unequivocally demonstrates your specialized expertise and practical proficiency in API hacking and comprehensive security.
- Elevated & Diversified Career Prospects: Significantly enhance your marketability and open doors to advanced roles such as API Security Engineer, Lead Penetration Tester, Senior Application Security Analyst, and DevSecOps Specialist across various industries.
- Proactive & Attacker-Minded Security Posture: Cultivate a comprehensive understanding of API vulnerabilities from an attacker’s highly strategic perspective, enabling you to not only identify but also proactively mitigate risks throughout the entire API development lifecycle.
- Immediately Deployable & Practical Skills: Gain direct, hands-on skills and methodologies that are immediately applicable to securing real-world API ecosystems and integrating robust security practices directly into development and operational workflows.
- Strategic Contribution to Secure API Development: Be exceptionally well-equipped to provide critical guidance and advise development teams on secure coding practices, architectural decisions, and robust, resilient API design principles that withstand sophisticated attacks.
- Unparalleled Confidence in API Assessments: Approach complex API penetration tests, comprehensive security audits, and vulnerability assessments with unparalleled confidence, capable of uncovering even the most subtle and intricate vulnerabilities often missed by automated tools.
- PROS
- Highly Practical & Immersive Lab-Oriented Approach: The course strongly emphasizes hands-on application and practical exercises, allowing learners to immediately practice and internalize complex concepts in a controlled, realistic environment.
- Industry-Recognized & Valued Certification: Provides a tangible and respected credential (CAPIE) that significantly validates your expertise and enhances professional credibility, making you a more attractive candidate in the competitive cybersecurity job market.
- Cutting-Edge & Continuously Updated Curriculum: With its May 2025 update, the content is meticulously refreshed, ensuring relevance with the absolute latest API security threats, advanced tools, and current methodologies.
- Directly Addresses OWASP API Top 10 Risks: The syllabus is explicitly focused on the OWASP API Top 10, meaning the learning is directly applicable to identifying, exploiting, and remediating the most critical API security risks in real-world scenarios.
- CONS
- Intensive Pacing & Limited Depth for Beginners: The relatively concise 6.1-hour duration means the course is highly concentrated and fast-paced, which might require significant dedicated self-study and additional practice for beginners to achieve complete mastery of all advanced topics.
Learning Tracks: English,IT & Software,IT Certifications
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