Can you ever imagine the impact on your business if it went offline on Black Friday or Cyber Monday due to a cyberattack?
Black Friday is the biggest day in the retail calendar. It’s also the riskiest. As you gear up for huge surges in online traffic, ask yourself: have you protected the APIs on which the business runs?
The Black Friday API Boom
When you think about Black Friday, what images come to mind? Lines of tents and chairs outside malls? Discount-crazed shoppers barging their way past shell-shocked retail workers?
While these images were once synonymous with the calendar’s biggest commercial event, in reality, Black Friday is now more of an online event than an in-person one. That means the biggest risk to retailers is no longer violence or property destruction; it’s cybercrime.
Black Friday 2025 is expected to be yet another record-breaking year for e-commerce traffic, and APIs will power it all. Your online store depends on APIs. The entire digital shopping experience, from browsing to checkout, relies on APIs.
There are two API risks that practitioners should focus on for Black Friday: compromise and denial of service.
Black Friday is not only an opportunity for shoppers, but for attackers as well. The busiest time of the year is great cover for an attack, especially if that attack involves patterns of behavior that might be obvious at other times, like account takeover attempts.
Of course, security and reliability are intertwined, so protecting your APIs from compromise is also ensuring they’re operationally sound. Think about it: what would happen if, as Black Friday begins, your product availability, pricing, shipping, payment, or loyalty programs failed? What impact would that have on your bottom line? Could your business weather that financial storm?
Here’s what these questions boil down to: can you afford to leave your APIs unprotected?
Why Attackers Target Retail APIs
APIs – and retailer APIs in particular – are a favorite target for attackers. Why? Because not only do they power critical applications; they also expose valuable data.
Personally identifiable information (PII), payment data, session tokens, and more flow through APIs. Attackers want that data. To get it, they’ll exploit a range of attack vectors:
- Broken Authentication: Attackers exploit weak login or session controls to take over a customer or admin account. They might abuse this access to change shipping details or access private data.
- Business Logic Abuse: Attackers manipulate workflows to exploit business logic vulnerabilities. For example, to repeatedly use a single-use coupon or place orders without payment.
- Injection Attacks: Attackers insert malicious code into inputs to access and steal sensitive backend data.
- Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS): Attackers flood APIs with traffic to overwhelm the e-commerce system, making the site unavailable to shopping.
And we’re not talking hypothetically. In January 2024, Halara, a popular Hong Kong-based clothing retailer suffered an API breach that exposed 941,910 records including first/last names, phone numbers, home addresses, and locations.
The Cost of an API Breach
The cost of such breaches can be enormous.
If your systems go down, you’ll not only lose sales in the moment, but can even miss out on sales in the years to come. In the mad dash to snag a deal on Black Friday 2026, customers will remember that you didn’t come through for them on Black Friday 2025 or any other day, for that matter. Essentially, you’ll have betrayed their trust, and they’ll make you pay for that.
But the financial consequences can go far beyond just lost sales. If an attack on your APIs exposes sensitive data, you’ll likely be subject to serious regulatory penalties, such as those from PCI and GDPR.
Again, take a moment to consider whether your business could recover from this kind of situation. Maybe, with a bit of elbow grease, you’d be able to make up for lost sales. Maybe you have enough money in your coffers to deal with a regulatory fine. But could you deal with both at the same time?
Pre–Black Friday API Security Checklist
Now is the time to prepare. Use this quick checklist to evaluate where you stand on API security before the Black Friday traffic surge hits.
| Category | Readiness Questions | Why It Matters |
| API Inventory | • Do you have a complete, up-to-date inventory of all APIs? • Have shadow, orphaned, or deprecated APIs been identified? • Do you know which APIs are externally exposed? |
Unseen APIs are the easiest entry point for attackers. You can’t protect what you can’t see. |
| Monitoring & Detection | • Do you have continuous monitoring in place? • Can you detect anomalies, abuse patterns, and active attacks in real time? • Is alerting automated and 24/7? |
Threats don’t wait for business hours — attackers target peak shopping windows. |
| Authentication & Access Control | • Are your APIs protected with strong authentication and authorization controls? • Are rate limits and quotas properly configured for high-traffic periods? • Are sensitive endpoints locked down? |
Weak auth and unlimited access are the main drivers of API abuse, account takeover, and overload. |
| API Testing & Validation | • Have your APIs been tested for logic flaws, broken authentication, and injection risks? • Do you run regular security tests in pre-production and production? • Are partner APIs and integrations validated? |
Logic-level vulnerabilities often bypass traditional security tools and become high-impact breaches. |
| Automation & Resilience | • Can you automatically block attacks at scale? • Is your incident response automated for common attack scenarios? • Can your security layer scale with Black Friday traffic? |
Manual response doesn’t survive high-volume attacks. Automation = uptime and revenue protection. |
If you want to make this checklist even easier, Wallarm brings all of these checks — visibility, monitoring, protection, and automation — into one unified platform to help retailers stay secure during the year’s biggest shopping weekend.
How Wallarm Helps Retailers Stay Secure
On Black Friday, of all days, your API security should be a priority. You need protection that can keep pace with the chaos. Wallarm does exactly that, without exhausting your team.
- Unified protection: Retailers juggle a complex mix of APIs: old, new, mobile, partner-facing, and more. Wallarm puts all of them under one security umbrella so you don’t get blindsided by forgotten endpoints.
- AI that detects and blocks complex attacks: Wallarm inspects live traffic, spots malicious behavior, and blocks it on the fly. Our AI learns each APIs normal patterns, meaning it can block attacks without needing signatures of human intervention.
- Automatic discovery and risk scoring: Every retailer has shadow APIs. Wallarm surfaces them, ranks their risk, and shows you where you’re exposed.
- Built for traffic surges: Black Friday sends traffic through the roof. Wallarm scales with it so your security layer never becomes a bottleneck.
- Real-time visibility into API abuse and vulnerabilities: Wallarm surfaces live attacks, suspicious behavior, and exposed API risks instantly, so your team sees issues the moment they emerge – not after damage is done.
Keep your APIs secure this Black Friday.
The post APIs Are the Retail Engine: How to Secure Them This Black Friday appeared first on Wallarm.