Alternatives to APIsec at Mid-market companies

Traditional assessment tools often require agents, SDKs, or build-time instrumentation. This scanner operates as a black-box solution: it sends only read-only methods (GET and HEAD) plus text-only POST for LLM probes, and it never modifies your services. Because it does not need access to source code or runtime environments, it works across languages, frameworks, and cloud providers. Scan completion typically occurs in under a minute, providing a risk score and prioritized findings that you can act on immediately.

The scanner evaluates 12 security categories aligned to the OWASP API Top 10 (2023). It checks authentication bypasses, JWT misconfigurations such as alg=none or expired tokens, BOLA and IDOR via sequential and adjacent ID probing, and BFLA through admin endpoint discovery and permission leakage. It identifies over-exposed properties and mass-assignment surfaces, CORS wildcard misconfigurations, dangerous HTTP methods, and debug endpoints. Additional checks cover rate-limiting headers, oversized responses, PII patterns including email and context-aware SSN, API key formats for AWS and GitHub, HTTPS enforcement, HSTS, mixed content, SSRF indicators involving internal IPs, and inventory issues such as missing versioning. LLM security testing includes 18 adversarial probes across Quick, Standard, and Deep tiers, covering system prompt extraction, instruction override, jailbreak patterns, data exfiltration attempts, and token smuggling.

The tool parses OpenAPI 3.0, 3.1, and Swagger 2.0 files with recursive $ref resolution. It cross-references the spec definitions against runtime observations to surface undefined security schemes, unexpected sensitive fields, deprecated operations, and missing pagination. This comparison highlights deviations between documented behavior and actual responses, helping you identify inconsistencies that may indicate implementation drift or undocumented endpoints.

Authenticated scanning is available from the Starter tier upward, supporting Bearer tokens, API keys, Basic auth, and cookies. Domain verification requires a DNS TXT record or an HTTP well-known file to ensure only the domain owner can submit credentials. The scanner forwards a strict allowlist of headers, including Authorization, X-API-Key, Cookie, and custom X-Custom-* headers. All testing is read-only, with destructive payloads never sent. Private IPs, localhost, and cloud metadata endpoints are blocked at multiple layers, and customer data is deletable on demand and never used for model training.

The Web Dashboard centralizes scans, report viewing, score trend tracking, and branded compliance PDF downloads. The CLI npm package supports commands such as middlebrick scan <url> with JSON or text output. A GitHub Action can gate CI/CD, failing builds when scores drop below your configured threshold. The MCP server enables scanning from AI coding assistants. For recurring assessments, Pro tier offers scheduled rescans every 6 hours, daily, weekly, or monthly, with diff detection for new and resolved findings, score drift tracking, rate-limited email alerts, HMAC-SHA256 signed webhooks, and auto-disable after consecutive failures.