Mastering API Security for Pentesting & Bug Bounties 2025

Explore the fundamentals and types of APIs, set up an API, and perform security tests to identify vulnerabilities, with real bug bounty scope examples from Bugcrowd and HackerOne.

Identify api attack surface by tracking in-scope targets from bug bounty data, extracting asset identifiers, and listing api endpoints across programs to discover security issues.

Identify publicly documented API bug bounty targets to map the API attack surface, including unauthenticated requests, IDOR, SSRF, and inventory mismanagement.

Explore HackerOne API reports, understand API fundamentals, and learn how to secure API endpoints against data breaches, authentication attacks, and OWASP top 10 vulnerabilities.

Identify the three real-world api types—Rest, GraphQL, and Soap—and highlight Rest as the most widely used, with GraphQL by Facebook and Soap for infrastructure-based apps.

Understand how a rest api enables client–server communication through endpoints, methods like get info, and parameters such as photo id, with responses in json.

Explain how soap, the simple object access protocol, uses xml to handle client requests and responses. Highlight the rest vs soap differentiation, noting rest uses json while soap uses xml.

Understand GraphQL, a query language developed by Facebook, that lets clients request only the data they need from the server; it also supports XML for querying data.

Examine use cases for Rest, Soap, and GraphQL APIs across social media, e-commerce, IoT, and enterprise contexts, noting Rest's popularity in social platforms and GraphQL's rising adoption.

Set up a practical API testing lab in Docker using Vapi to practice security test cases and explore the top ten API risks.

OpenAPI is a standard that lets APIs be understood by API tools. Download swagger.json to view the API schema, including info, title, description, and endpoint details like content type.

Explore swagger ui and editor to import an openapi design specification, view api name, description, and endpoints, and interpret how api documentation is generated.

Explore how Swagger UI reveals endpoints and HTTP methods, identify exposed admin APIs, and use authorization tokens to try it out and test in QA, staging, and dev environments.

Learn how Swagger UI helps send API requests, authorize with a key, and diagnose unauthorized responses when the key is invalid.

Identify broken object level authorization in the first api, where attackers access other users' data by manipulating requests, illustrating OWASP’s guidance on access control failures.

Explore broken object level authorization in API security through hands-on testing with Postman and Burp Suite, demonstrating insecure direct object reference by fetching other users' data and reporting the vulnerability.

Explore Postman fundamentals to enhance API security testing with AI-assisted test case generation, cloud-synced workflows, and continuous testing capabilities across Mac, Windows, and Linux.

Create a workspace and name it clearly for your API security test training. Access the API request endpoints for Bentley.

Learn how to use Postman collections to organize APIs, import collection JSON and environment files, and access endpoints for login, user details, and balance.

Import Postman environment files and collections, set the host variable to the app's target IP on your Ubuntu instance, and save and enable the configuration.

Explore excessive data exposure in APIs and mobile apps, learn how missing rate limiting enables brute-force OTP attacks, and review real-world bug bounty payouts for account takeover findings.

This lecture demonstrates mass assignment vulnerability, showing how extra parameters like role or credits in api requests can elevate privileges or modify user data.

Learn how mass assignment can grant admin privileges or credits via crafted API requests. Explore insecure cross-origin resource sharing and how star, null, or evil.com headers enable data exposure.

Fuzzing helps identify novel vulnerabilities in APIs using a shell-based fuzzer, including SQL injection and XSS. Filter thousands of requests to a few endpoints and validate findings with Burp Suite.

Demonstrate converting messy JSON data into a beautified, searchable format using the grown tool and a JSON beautifier, contrasting non-beautified and beautified outputs.

Use gron to parse json outputs and grep for data, search specific values like currency rates, handle large api responses, and explore Postman and AI-assisted pentesting for sensitive information.

Learn to use ai to craft and test api pentests by generating tests, validating payload reflection in responses, and visualizing results across parameterized test cases like emails and passwords.

Explore additional courses to expand your pentesting and bug bounty skills and strengthen your professional profile, continuing your learning journey beyond this module.