Every product team ships an API before it ships a UI now. Mobile apps, partner integrations, internal microservices, and the AI agents plugging into your systems all talk through the same set of endpoints. That concentration of traffic makes the API layer the single most attractive target in your stack, and attackers know it. The Verizon 2025 Data Breach Investigations Report lists web application and API attacks among the top vectors behind confirmed breaches, and the traffic keeps shifting away from browser sessions toward machine-to-machine calls that most security teams still monitor less closely than they monitor user logins.
Broken Object Level Authorization Still Breaks Most APIs
OWASP ranks broken object level authorization as API1 on its 2023 API Security Top 10, and it still causes more real-world incidents than any other API flaw. The pattern is simple and teams keep shipping it anyway: an endpoint like /api/orders/12345 authenticates the caller correctly but never checks whether that caller actually owns order 12345. Swap the ID and you read or modify someone else's data.
Fix this at the object level, not the endpoint level. Every handler that touches a resource by ID needs an explicit ownership or permission check before it returns data, not just a valid session token at the door. Centralize that check in a shared authorization library or policy engine so individual developers cannot forget it under deadline pressure. Run automated authorization fuzzing against your API test suite the same way you run functional tests. Postman's State of the API Report has flagged authorization testing as one of the most commonly skipped steps in API development workflows for several years running, and BOLA keeps showing up in bug bounty reports because teams still treat authentication and authorization as the same problem.
