Akto expanded capabilities to protect right

We’re excited to introduce API Protection, the fourth pillar of the Akto API Security Platform. This new module adds real-time API threat detection and blocking to Akto’s platform, which already includes API Discovery, Security Testing, and Posture Management. With API Protection, you can cover the full API lifecycle – from identifying every API and hardening it before release to actively defending it at runtime – without any trade-offs between proactive and real-time security. It’s the missing piece that ensures your APIs are safe before, during, and after deployment.

The platform now spans the entire lifecycle: you discover what APIs exist, test them for vulnerabilities, fix their security posture, and now, with Akto’s new module, protect them from live attacks. API Protection joins Discovery, Testing, and Posture Management as the fourth pillar of our unified platform:

1. Module 1: API Discovery

2. Module 2: API Security Testing

3. Module 3: API Security Posture Management

4. Module 4: API Protection [NEW]

Full API Lifecycle Security with Fourth Pillar

Knowing your API vulnerabilities and being able to test them proactively is a great approach to API security, but what do you do about real-time API threats?

For comprehensive coverage of APIs in your API Security program, appsec teams must plan to cover the complete development pipeline with API Security tooling, which includes everything from code to runtime.

Akto has been covering the code, pull request, staging, and production stages of the pipeline with Discovery, posture monitoring, and testing capabilities up until now. We have now added threat detection and blocking in real-time to the production stage. By extending coverage to production traffic, Akto ensures you don’t have to choose between shifting left (proactively testing in CI/CD) and shielding right (defending in production). You can harden APIs before release and automatically guard them in real time once they’re live. This unified approach means application security teams get complete visibility and control at every stage, all through one platform.

Real-Time Threat Detection & Blocking – No Changes to Your Setup

Akto API Protection monitors your live API traffic in real-time to identify and stop threats instantly, all without requiring any changes to your architecture or deployment. The module plugs into your existing environment using Akto’s extensive library of 50+ supported traffic connectors, so you can begin monitoring and blocking attacks on day one. You don’t need to install new proxies, agents, or code – if you’re already feeding API traffic to Akto (through a gateway, service mesh, mirroring, etc.), API Protection will seamlessly leverage that. No configuration changes, no performance hit, and no downtime. Simply enable the module and Akto takes up post as an always-on guardian for your APIs. Behind the scenes, API Protection analyzes every API call and response as it happens in a completely out-of-band manner.

This is our first phase of the API Protection module release. Based on customer feedback, we will work to add more features to this module in the next few months and increase its depth and breadth.

Key Features of Akto API Protection

For security teams, API Protection delivers powerful new capabilities that make runtime API defense easy and effective. Here are the key features:

• Real-Time Attack Detection & Blocking: Instantly flag and stop malicious API requests in production. Akto identifies threats in real time and can automatically block attacks before they cause damage, giving you immediate protection against API abuse and breaches.

• Anomaly + Signature-Based Defense: Akto API Protection uses a hybrid detection engine combining anomaly detection (to catch unusual behavior or abuse patterns) with rule-based signatures (to recognize known attack techniques). If an attacker deviates from normal API usage or triggers a known malicious pattern, Akto will catch it.

• OWASP API Top 10 Coverage: Out-of-the-box rules cover the full range of API threats, including all OWASP API Security Top 10 issues – from injection attacks and broken authentication to data exposure and misuse of APIs. Your APIs get a baseline shield against the most common and dangerous vulnerabilities.

• Geolocation & Contextual Insights: Every alert comes enriched with detailed context. Akto pinpoints the source of an attack (with geolocation data for the IP address), the target endpoint and method, headers, payloads, and more. This rich attack context helps your team triage and investigate incidents faster. You’ll know what happened and who did it at a glance – crucial for quick response and analysis.

• Custom Policies & Tuning: We know every API is unique. Akto lets you define custom security policies to tailor protection to your environment.

• Seamless Alerting & Integrations: When a threat is detected, Akto can instantly notify your team through the tools you already use, including Slack, Microsoft Teams, PagerDuty, email, or your SIEM – whatever fits your workflow.

The power of shift left + Protect right in One Platform

Akto’s platform now gives you both proactive security and reactive defense in one place. You no longer have to juggle separate solutions for pre-production testing and runtime protection – or worry that focusing on one will leave you blind on the other.

One of the biggest advantages of adding API Protection as the fourth module is the synergy it creates.

For example, Akto’s API Security Testing module finds vulnerabilities before release, and now API Protection can safeguard those same APIs in case some issues slip through or can’t be patched immediately. If Security Testing uncovers a flaw that will take a sprint to fix, you can catch attackers through API Protection rules to cover that weakness in the meantime.

Conversely, when API Protection detects a new attack pattern in production, you can feed that insight back into your testing and posture management to prevent similar issues going forward.

It’s a virtuous cycle: find issues early and also stop attacks cold at runtime.

Get Started with API Protection With Akto

By combining robust discovery, testing, and posture management with advanced threat detection and blocking capabilities, Akto ensures that APIs remain secure throughout their lifecycle.

Akto API Protection is available today as part of the Akto API Security Platform. Contact us to learn how you can add this capability to your plan.

Request a personalized demo and our team will walk you through the API Protection module.

The future of API security is proactive, adaptive, and always-on—just like Akto.

Join us for the product launch week webinar this Friday, March 28, and catch a live demo of the features introduced during the week.