Alternatives to 42Crunch for Cyber insurance renewal evidence

Organizations seeking cyber insurance renewal evidence require objective indicators of API risk that underwriters can review. middleBrick is a self-service API security scanner designed to produce repeatable, timestamped risk scores and prioritized findings that can support audit evidence for security controls. The scanner operates as a black-box solution that submits a URL and receives a letter-grade risk assessment with concrete issues to review.

middleBrick maps findings to OWASP API Top 10 (2023), and its results align with security controls described in PCI-DSS 4.0 and SOC 2 Type II. The scanner covers 12 categories derived from the OWASP API Top 10, including Authentication, BOLA and IDOR, BFLA and Privilege Escalation, Property Authorization, Input Validation, Rate Limiting and Resource Consumption, Data Exposure, Encryption, SSRF, Inventory Management, Unsafe Consumption, and LLM / AI Security. These categories provide a structured set of findings that can illustrate due diligence and control validation for underwriters.

Scans complete in under a minute using read-only methods such as GET and HEAD, with text-only POST for LLM probes. The tool supports authenticated scanning with Bearer tokens, API keys, Basic auth, and cookies, gated by domain verification to ensure only domain owners submit credentials. OpenAPI 3.0, 3.1, and Swagger 2.0 specifications are parsed with recursive $ref resolution, cross-referenced against runtime behavior to highlight undefined security schemes or deprecated operations. This approach generates evidence around surface area and configuration issues without requiring code access or SDK integration.

Pro tier features enable scheduled rescans at intervals such as 6 hours, daily, weekly, or monthly, with diff detection that surfaces new findings, resolved findings, and score drift over time. Email alerts are rate-limited to one per hour per API, and HMAC-SHA256 signed webhooks can notify external systems while auto-disabling after 5 consecutive failures. The Web Dashboard centralizes scan records, score trends, and allows export of branded compliance PDFs that can be presented as part of renewal documentation.

middleBrick is a scanning tool and does not fix, patch, block, or remediate findings. It does not perform active SQL injection or command injection testing, does not detect business logic vulnerabilities, does not detect blind SSRF, and does not replace a human pentester for high-stakes audits. These limitations are important to acknowledge when compiling renewal evidence, as they clarify the boundaries of what the tool can contribute to an overall security posture assessment.