APIs are the primary target of AI-assisted attacks — credential stuffing, account takeover, exploitation of endpoints your team doesn't know exist. That last one is increasingly common: shadow APIs are a real inventory problem, and attackers find them before you do.

The shift to agentic AI makes this harder. MCP servers expose tools and data across entire agent chains, and a poorly secured API doesn't just leak data anymore — it can become an entry point into every system that agent touches.

WAFs weren't built for this. They inspect individual requests, not behavioral patterns across sessions. They don't know your API inventory. They can't detect business logic abuse.

Datadog App & API Protection takes a different approach — using the same instrumentation your teams already run for observability to give you:

• Full API visibility: Discover every endpoint in your environment, including the ones that aren't in the docs.
• OWASP risk detection and API security testing: Find exploitable vulnerabilities before attackers do, with testing built into the same workflow as detection.
• Business logic abuse defense: Catch attacks that look like valid traffic — credential stuffing, scraping, account takeover — that signature-based tools miss.
• Real-time blocking: Stop attacks in flight, not after the postmortem.

If your API security strategy still starts and ends with a WAF, this session is worth your time.