Across the digital landscape of 2026, API security has become one of the most critical challenges facing organizations worldwide. The industry has reached USD 12.6 billion in market size, driven by API security issues costing organizations USD 87 billion annually with projections exceeding USD 100 billion. Yet despite this massive investment, security teams continue making a fundamental mistake: treating web and API defense as separate disciplines.
The costliest mistake in modern security isn’t insufficient investment—it’s treating web and API defense as separate disciplines.
This separation creates dangerous gaps in your security posture. When infrastructure teams, application developers, and API developers operate in silos, authorization vulnerabilities emerge at the seams. Missing authentication was the most frequently reported vulnerability in 2025, highlighting how disconnected security strategies fail to protect modern applications. You cannot secure APIs effectively when your web application firewall operates independently from your API gateway controls.
Broken input validation represents the most common category of API flaws, encompassing injection attacks, mass assignment, and path traversal vulnerabilities. These implementation mistakes translate directly into production security risks. Traditional perimeter-based security models designed for web applications fail completely in dynamic API environments where thousands of APIs span legacy systems, cloud-native applications, and third-party integrations. Real-time data synchronization between systems via APIs also increases the attack surface if not secured properly, emphasizing the need for operational efficiency in defenses.
Authorization failures present the most exploitable weakness. Broken Object Level Authorization and Broken Function Level Authorization remain leading API security risks, with experts predicting broken authorization will dominate exploits in 2026. The “trusted client” fallacy demonstrates how API teams mistakenly rely on frontend clients to enforce security controls that must exist at the API layer itself. Conventional PAM and IGA systems struggle to provision machine and application access with the speed that autonomous applications require.
Shadow APIs compound these challenges markedly. Undocumented or unmanaged APIs proliferate across enterprises, creating blind spots that attackers actively exploit. REST APIs, which will secure the second-largest market share during 2026-2035, increasingly require OAuth 2.0 and JWT tokens for proper authentication. However, breaches or vulnerabilities in shadow APIs remain uncommon, with few documented exploit cases despite widespread concerns about their theoretical risks.
Machine identities introduce additional complexity. APIs powering AI applications and agents face targeted attacks as non-human access patterns multiply. Token exchange and JWT-assertion-grant protocols enable least privileged access for AI clients, but only when integrated into unified security frameworks. Organizations must abandon siloed approaches and implement exhaustive strategies that address web and API security as interconnected components of the same defense system.
