Alternatives to 42Crunch at Mid-market companies

Organizations balancing development velocity and risk require a scanner that is simple to introduce yet rigorous in coverage. Our solution is a self-service API security scanner that accepts a URL and returns a risk grade from A to F with prioritized findings. It operates as a black-box scanner, requiring no agents, no access to source code, and no SDK integration. Scans complete in under a minute using read-only methods and text-only POST probes, making it suitable for continuous evaluation without impacting production workloads.

The scanner evaluates APIs across 12 categories derived from the OWASP API Top 10 (2023). It maps findings to controls from frameworks such as PCI-DSS 4.0 and SOC 2 Type II, while supporting audit evidence for other security regimes through alignment rather than certification claims.

• Authentication — multi-method bypass, JWT misconfigurations such as alg=none and HS256, expired or missing claims, and security header compliance.
• BOLA / IDOR — sequential ID enumeration and active adjacent-ID probing to identify insecure direct object references.
• BFLA / Privilege Escalation — admin endpoint probing and role or permission field leakage indicating over-privileged access paths.
• Property Authorization — over-exposure of internal fields, mass-assignment surface, and sensitive data in responses.
• Input Validation — CORS wildcard usage with and without credentials, dangerous HTTP methods, and debug endpoints.
• Rate Limiting & Resource Consumption — detection of rate-limit headers, oversized responses, and unpaginated arrays that may lead to resource exhaustion.
• Data Exposure — discovery of PII patterns including email addresses, Luhn-validated card numbers, context-aware SSN formats, API key patterns (e.g., AWS, Stripe, GitHub, Slack), and error or stack-trace leakage.
• Encryption — verification of HTTPS redirects, HSTS presence, secure cookie flags, and mixed content issues.
• SSRF — identification of URL-accepting parameters and body fields, internal IP detection, and active probes attempting IP-bypass techniques.
• Inventory Management — detection of missing versioning, legacy path patterns, and server fingerprinting that increases attack surface.
• Unsafe Consumption — excessive third-party URLs and broad webhook/callback surfaces that expand dependency risk.
• LLM / AI Security — 18 adversarial probes across Quick, Standard, and Deep scan tiers targeting system prompt extraction, instruction override, DAN and roleplay jailbreaks, data exfiltration, cost exploitation, encoding bypasses, prompt injection variants, token smuggling, tool abuse, nested instruction injection, and PII extraction.

For API specifications, the scanner parses OpenAPI 3.0, 3.1, and Swagger 2.0 with recursive $ref resolution and cross-references spec definitions against runtime findings to highlight undefined security schemes, sensitive fields, deprecated operations, and missing pagination.

Authenticated scans are available from the Starter tier and above, supporting Bearer tokens, API keys, Basic auth, and cookies. Access to credentials is gated by domain verification, which requires a DNS TXT record or an HTTP well-known file to confirm ownership before authenticated scans are permitted.

The scanner forwards only a restricted set of headers, including Authorization, X-API-Key, Cookie, and custom headers prefixed with X-Custom-*. This approach limits the blast radius while still allowing meaningful security testing against authenticated endpoints.

The Web Dashboard centralizes scan results, score trends, and report generation, enabling teams to track improvements and regressions over time. Compliance evidence can be exported as branded PDFs directly from the interface.

The CLI, distributed as an npm package named middlebrick, allows scans to be run with a simple command such as middlebrick scan <url>, providing output in JSON or text formats for integration into existing tooling.

The GitHub Action enforces quality gates within CI/CD pipelines, failing builds when the risk score drops below a defined threshold. The MCP Server enables scanning from AI coding assistants such as Claude and Cursor, embedding security checks into development workflows.

For ongoing risk management, the Pro tier offers scheduled rescans at intervals of six hours, daily, weekly, or monthly. Diff detection highlights new findings, resolved findings, and score drift between scans. Alerts are rate-limited to one notification per hour per API and delivered via email. Webhooks are HMAC-SHA256 signed and automatically disabled after five consecutive failures to prevent alert storms.

The scanner employs a read-only methodology and never sends destructive payloads. Private IPs, localhost, and cloud metadata endpoints are blocked at multiple layers to prevent accidental or malicious impact on internal infrastructure.

Customer scan data is deletable on demand and purged within 30 days of cancellation. Data is never sold and is not used for model training.

It is important to recognize what the scanner does not do. It does not fix, patch, block, or remediate issues; it detects and reports with remediation guidance. It does not perform active SQL injection or command injection testing, which requires intrusive payloads outside the intended scope. It does not discover business logic vulnerabilities, blind SSRF relying on out-of-band infrastructure, or replace human pentesters for high-stakes audits. These limitations are documented explicitly to support realistic expectations and responsible use.