API Honeypots: How Endpoint Decoys Catch Attackers Before They Reach Your Infrastructure

Here is a sobering reality: 95% of organizations experienced an API security incident in 2024. Attackers are not knocking on your front door anymore. They are probing your APIs, hunting for authentication endpoints, enumerating user data, and launching sophisticated injection attacks against your backend services.

The worst part? Most security teams only discover these attacks after the damage is done.

Today, we are announcing Endpoint Decoys, a new capability that fundamentally changes how you detect and respond to API threats. This is not incremental improvement. This is a paradigm shift in API security.

The API Attack Epidemic: Why Traditional Defenses Are Failing

Your APIs are under siege. Every day, attackers deploy automated tools to:

Credential stuff millions of username/password combinations against your login endpoints (see our guide on carding attack protection)
Enumerate user accounts, admin panels, and sensitive data endpoints
Probe for SQL injection, command injection, and XXE vulnerabilities
Map your entire API surface to find the weakest entry point

Traditional API security tools respond reactively. They analyze logs after attacks occur. They generate alerts that drown in noise. They rely on signatures that sophisticated attackers easily evade.

The fundamental problem is this: by the time you detect an attack on a real endpoint, the attacker has already gathered intelligence, tested your defenses, and potentially exfiltrated data.

What if you could detect attackers before they ever reach a real endpoint?

Introducing Endpoint Decoys: Your API Early Warning System

Endpoint Decoys are advanced API honeypots that mimic real authentication, admin, and data endpoints. They look indistinguishable from legitimate APIs to attackers, but any request to these endpoints is, by definition, malicious.

Here is the key insight: legitimate users and applications never access endpoints that do not exist. Every request to an Endpoint Decoy is an attack attempt. No exceptions. No false positives.

When an attacker probes /api/admin/login or /api/v2/users/export and those endpoints are decoys, you have instantly identified a threat actor without them knowing they have been caught.

What Makes Endpoint Decoys Different

Unlike traditional honeypots that passively wait for attackers, Endpoint Decoys are intelligent trap systems that actively analyze attack patterns. For a comparison of honeypot vs CAPTCHA approaches, see our honeypot effectiveness guide.

Full HTTP Method Support Deploy decoys that respond to GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, and PATCH requests. Attackers cannot distinguish your decoys from real endpoints based on supported methods.

Automatic Attack Pattern Recognition Every request is analyzed in real-time for known attack signatures:

Attack Type	Detection Method	Severity
SQL Injection	UNION attacks, comment sequences, encoded payloads	Critical
Command Injection	Shell commands, pipes, backticks, system calls	Critical
XXE (XML External Entity)	DOCTYPE declarations, entity references	Critical
Cross-Site Scripting	Script tags, event handlers, javascript: URIs	High
Path Traversal	Directory traversal patterns, encoded sequences	High
Insecure Deserialization	Serialized object patterns, magic bytes	High
Mass Assignment	Attempts to modify role, admin, or permission fields	Medium

Full Payload Capture Optionally capture complete request bodies for forensic analysis. Understand exactly what attackers are sending, what data they are trying to exfiltrate, and what vulnerabilities they are attempting to exploit.

Integrated Threat Intelligence Every detection is enriched with AbuseIPDB reputation data, geographic information, ISP details, and usage type classification. Know immediately if the attacker is using a known malicious IP, VPN exit node, or botnet infrastructure.

How Endpoint Decoys Work: Technical Deep Dive

Let me walk you through the detection flow when an attacker encounters your Endpoint Decoy.

Step 1: Attacker Reconnaissance

An attacker running an API enumeration tool sends this request:

POST /api/v1/authenticate HTTP/1.1
Host: yourapp.com
Content-Type: application/json

{"username": "admin' OR '1'='1", "password": "password123"}

They are probing for a login endpoint while simultaneously testing for SQL injection.

Step 2: Decoy Interception

Your Endpoint Decoy at /api/v1/authenticate intercepts the request. Because this is not a real endpoint in your application, you know with 100% certainty this is an attack.

Step 3: Attack Pattern Analysis

WebDecoy’s detection engine analyzes the request:

Request Method: POST
Content-Type: application/json
Request Body Size: 62 bytes

Attack Signatures Detected:
  [CRITICAL] SQL Injection - OR statement in authentication field
  [HIGH] Authentication Abuse - Login endpoint probe

Authorization Header: Not Present

Step 4: Forensic Data Capture

The complete payload is captured:

{
  "timestamp": "2025-11-26T14:32:18.445Z",
  "source_ip": "185.220.101.42",
  "method": "POST",
  "path": "/api/v1/authenticate",
  "content_type": "application/json",
  "body": "{\"username\": \"admin' OR '1'='1\", \"password\": \"password123\"}",
  "attack_signatures": ["sql_injection", "auth_probe"],
  "severity": "critical"
}

Step 5: Automated Response

Based on your configured response actions:

IP is immediately added to your block list
Webhook notification fires to your SIEM
Alert sent to your security team
Rate limiting applied across all your real endpoints

The attacker never touched your real infrastructure. They revealed their presence, their techniques, and their intent before getting anywhere near actual data.

Strategic Deployment: Where to Place Your Endpoint Decoys

Effective decoy placement requires understanding attacker behavior. Here are the highest-value deployment strategies:

1. Authentication Honeypots

Credential stuffing is one of the most common API attacks. Deploy decoys at paths attackers expect to find:

/api/auth/login
/api/v1/authenticate
/api/admin/signin
/api/oauth/token
/api/session

Any request to these fake authentication endpoints reveals an attacker attempting credential stuffing or brute force attacks.

2. Data Enumeration Traps

Attackers probe for endpoints that expose user data, typically early in their reconnaissance:

/api/users
/api/admin/users
/api/v2/accounts
/graphql (especially powerful for GraphQL introspection attempts)
/api/customers/export

3. Vulnerability Scanner Detection

Automated vulnerability scanners have predictable patterns. Catch them with decoys at:

/api/admin/export
/api/backup
/api/debug
/api/config
/api/internal/status
/api/.env

These paths attract scanners looking for misconfigurations, debug endpoints, or exposed sensitive data.

4. Version-Based Traps

Attackers often probe for old API versions hoping to find unpatched vulnerabilities:

/api/v0/users
/api/v1/admin (when your real API is v3)
/api/beta/internal

Real-World Impact: What Our Customers Are Seeing

Early adopters of Endpoint Decoys have reported remarkable results.

Financial Services Company

A mid-size fintech deployed decoys at /api/auth/login and /api/accounts/export:

2,400+ attack attempts detected in the first 72 hours
87% were credential stuffing attempts from known botnet infrastructure
13% were SQLi probes attempting to bypass authentication
Zero false positives reported

Their security team went from reactive incident response to proactive threat hunting overnight.

E-commerce Platform

An online retailer placed decoys across their checkout and user management API surface:

Detected a coordinated carding attack attempting to validate stolen credit cards
Identified 18 distinct IP ranges associated with the attack
Blocked the entire operation before a single transaction was attempted

SaaS Provider

A B2B SaaS company with a GraphQL API deployed a decoy at /graphql:

Caught introspection queries from automated tools mapping their schema
Identified subscription enumeration attempts probing for customer data
Blocked attackers at the reconnaissance phase before any exploitation attempts

The Zero False Positive Advantage

This is critical to understand: Endpoint Decoys have a 0% false positive rate by design.

Think about what that means:

Every alert requires investigation (and action)
No alert fatigue from noise
No legitimate user impact
No risk of blocking real traffic

Compare this to traditional WAF rules or anomaly detection systems that generate hundreds of alerts daily, most of which are false positives. Security teams become desensitized. Real attacks get lost in the noise.

Endpoint Decoys flip this dynamic. When you get an alert, it is always real.

Integration with Your Security Stack

Endpoint Decoys integrate seamlessly with WebDecoy’s existing capabilities and your broader security infrastructure:

Bot Scoring Integration

Detections from Endpoint Decoys feed directly into bot score calculations:

Attack pattern detections increase bot probability scores
Multiple attack types compound the score
Integration with TLS fingerprinting for multi-signal analysis

Response Actions

All existing WebDecoy response actions work with Endpoint Decoys:

IP Blocking - Immediate block across all properties
Rate Limiting - Throttle suspicious sources
Webhook Notifications - Real-time alerts to Slack, PagerDuty, or custom endpoints
Email Alerts - Immediate notification to security teams
SIEM Integration - Forward detections to Splunk, Datadog, or your logging platform (see our complete SIEM integration guide)

Threat Intelligence Enrichment

Every detection is automatically enriched with:

AbuseIPDB reputation score and reports
Geographic IP location (learn more about geographic consistency detection)
ISP and organization information
Usage type (residential, VPN, datacenter, etc.)

Getting Started with Endpoint Decoys

Deploying your first Endpoint Decoy takes less than five minutes:

Navigate to Decoys in your WebDecoy dashboard
Click Create Decoy
Select Endpoint as the decoy type
Configure the path (e.g., /api/auth/login)
Choose allowed HTTP methods (POST is common for auth endpoints)
Enable body capture for full forensic data
Deploy and start detecting

API Integration

For programmatic deployment:

POST /api/v1/organizations/{org_id}/properties/{property_id}/decoys

{
  "name": "Admin Login Honeypot",
  "path": "/api/admin/login",
  "decoy_type": "endpoint",
  "allowed_methods": ["POST"],
  "capture_body": true,
  "expected_content_type": "application/json"
}

The Future of Proactive API Security

API attacks are not slowing down. They are accelerating. Attackers are using AI to generate more sophisticated payloads. They are leveraging residential proxy networks to evade IP-based blocking. They are automating reconnaissance at scale.

Reactive security cannot keep up.

Endpoint Decoys represent a fundamental shift toward proactive defense. Instead of waiting for attacks to hit your real infrastructure, you are deploying intelligent traps that reveal attacker presence, capture their techniques, and enable immediate response.

The attacker thinks they are probing your API. In reality, you are studying them.

This intelligence advantage is transformative. You learn what endpoints attackers target. You understand their attack patterns. You identify their infrastructure. And you block them before they ever threaten real data.

Take Action: Protect Your APIs Today

Every hour you wait, attackers are probing your APIs. They are testing for vulnerabilities. They are enumerating your data. They are building the intelligence they need for a successful attack.

Endpoint Decoys give you the power to detect them first.

Get started with Endpoint Decoys and transform your API security from reactive to proactive.

Key Takeaways

Endpoint Decoys are API honeypots that detect attacks with zero false positives
Automatic attack pattern recognition identifies SQL injection, XXE, command injection, and more
Full payload capture enables forensic analysis of attack attempts
Integrated threat intelligence enriches every detection with reputation and geolocation data
Strategic deployment at authentication, enumeration, and vulnerability scanning paths maximizes detection
Seamless integration with existing WebDecoy capabilities and your security stack

Stop waiting for attacks to succeed. Start detecting them before they begin.

Deploy your first Endpoint Decoy now

Have questions about Endpoint Decoys? Contact our security team or join our Discord community for implementation guidance.

API Honeypots: Catch Attackers Before They Strike