5 Free Security APIs Every Developer Should Bookmark (With Python Examples)

Last year, a friend's startup got hacked through a dependency with a known vulnerability. The fix was available for 6 months. Nobody checked. These 5 free APIs could have prevented it — and they take minutes to set up. 1. Have I Been Pwned — Check If Emails Were Breached Troy Hunt's legendary service. Check any email against 13B+ breached accounts. import requests import hashlib def check_password_pwned ( password ): """ Check if a password appeared in data breaches (k-anonymity, safe) """ sha1 = hashlib . sha1 ( password . encode ()). hexdigest (). upper () prefix , suffix = sha1 [: 5 ], sha1 [ 5 :] resp = requests . get ( f ' https://api.pwnedpasswords.com/range/ { prefix } ' ) for line in resp . text . splitlines (): hash_suffix , count = line . split ( ' : ' ) if hash_suffix == suffix : return int ( count ) return 0 # Check (uses k-anonymity — your password is NEVER sent) count = check_password_pwned ( ' password123 ' ) print ( f ' Found in { count : , } breaches ' ) # Found in 123