January 31, 2017 GitLab, one of the world’s biggest collaborative development platforms, suffered a massive outage. For about 18 hours, millions of developers lost access to their repositories.

MILLIONS. What happened? During the investigation, they found out that an engineer had accidentally deleted a primary database while trying to fix a minor issue. Yeah, you read that right. A single command executed without the proper security and validation measures. And the worst part? That wasn’t even the biggest problem. The real disaster was that, at that moment, their backups didn’t work as expected. Their data recovery routines hadn’t been properly tested. No service. No backups. Total chaos. GitLab had to issue public apologies and work frantically for hours to regain their users’ trust.

What prevented this from being even worse? A checklist. Combined with prior testing and improved procedures implemented after the incident. But don’t think this only happens to big companies. It happens every single day. Everywhere. And it’s the same with APIs. Almost no company has a solid API security checklist. And even fewer have a good security checklist. Trust me—I know what I’m talking about. I’ve spent 5 years designing and building API security software at 42Crunch. The products I’ve built are used by some of the largest Fortune 500 companies. I’ve also worked with startups across the USA, Spain, India, France, and the UK. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that everyone fails at the same things.

This training contains the checklist you should be using. Based on my experience. No matter if you’re big or small. Let me break it down for you:

✔️ Did you know that misconfiguring OAuth2 can expose critical user data? Learn how to secure these implementations (Chapter 5, Minute 10:15). ✔️ The biggest mistakes when generating and validating JWTs—and how they can compromise your entire application’s security (Chapter 3, Minute 8:40). ✔️ Why implementing checklists in CI/CD can prevent deployment failures before they happen (Chapter 9, Minute 5:02). ✔️ How to detect misconfigured tokens in your APIs before someone steals them (Chapter 2, Minute 7:35). ✔️ Using environment variables correctly to prevent sensitive data leaks (Chapter 6, Minute 3:12). ✔️ Is your authentication system silently allowing brute-force attacks? Find out here (Chapter 2, Minute 12:25). ✔️ The three most common API mistakes and how to avoid them with simple fixes (Chapter 7, Minute 4:55). ✔️ Why documenting your APIs matters—and which tools make it easier (Chapter 6, Minute 2:43). ✔️ How to identify security vulnerabilities in data flows between applications (Chapter 8, Minute 6:40). ✔️ Want to reduce your app’s load time by 30% with a few simple tweaks? Here’s how (Chapter 7, Minute 3:15). ✔️ How to monitor API traffic to detect real-time threats before they become a problem (Chapter 10, Minute 8:12). ✔️ Why poorly configured CORS policies are a massive security hole (Chapter 6, Minute 7:20). ✔️ Detecting and mitigating unauthorized access attempts in distributed systems (Chapter 7, Minute 9:45). ✔️ Tracking errors in your CI/CD pipelines and fixing them fast (Chapter 9, Minute 6:25). ✔️ The difference between well-structured logs and total chaos—learn how to structure them (Chapter 10, Minute 2:18). ✔️ The key monitoring metrics you need to catch problems before they escalate (Chapter 10, Minute 3:42). ✔️ How to integrate code analysis tools into your pipelines to improve deployment quality (Chapter 9, Minute 7:33). ✔️ Avoid legal trouble: what personal data you should never store or process (Chapter 5, Minute 11:15).