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5 April 2019 (Brussels, Belgium) — Way back in 1995, when they were just a hundred and fifty million PCs on Earth, somebody had a wonderful idea. Or, to borrow a line from The Grinch, perhaps it was a wonderful, terrible idea.
Microsoft had put a huge amount of effort into turning Office into an open development platform. All sorts of large and small businesses had created programs (called “macros”) that were embedded inside Office documents and allowed them to create wonderful automated workflows, and there was a big developer community around creating and extending this.
But then somebody realized that there was an API for looking at your address book, an API for sending email and an API for making a macro run automatically when you opened a document.
An application program interface (API) is a set of routines, protocols, and tools for building software applications. Basically, an API specifies how software components should interact. Additionally, APIs are used when programming graphical user interface (GUI) components.
If you put these together in the right order, then you had a virus that would email itself to everybody you knew inside an innocuous-looking Word document, and as soon as they opened it it would spread to everyone they knew.
This was the “concept” virus, and it actually only infected about 35,000 computers. But four years later “Melissa”, doing much the same thing, really did go viral: at one point it even shut down parts of the Pentagon.
Yes, ancient history, but I use it as introduction to our interview with Philippe Dubuc, Principal Regional Solutions Architect for Ping Identity. Because no company knows better than Ping Identity the sophistication of cyber-attacks on enterprise networks, and how hackers … moving to the path of least resistance … are looking for new avenues to exploit, which is why the next wave of enterprise hacking is being carried out by exploiting those very APIs.
In the following interview, Phillipe:
- Gives us a nice introduction to application programming interfaces
- Talks about the Ping Identity product “PingIntelligence for APIs”
- Provides his views and why, given APIs really drive digital transformation efforts in the enterprise, securing them has never been more important, and
- Explains how Ping Identity uses Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to protect APIs
And below the video you will find a link to Ping Identity website to learn more on API security with PingIntelligence for APIs:
To learn more on API security with PingIntelligence for APIs, click here.