Wave of 40,000+ Cyberattacks Target API Environments

The GBHackers piece reports a dramatic surge in API-targeted activity, with security researchers documenting over 40,000 API incidents across more than 4,000 monitored environments in the first half of 2025. It notes that APIs have become the primary gateway for sophisticated attack campaigns designed to inject malicious code and disrupt operations.

Recent telemetry data reveals that 44% of advanced bot activity now specifically targets APIs, despite APIs representing only about 14% of all cyberattacks, according to Imperva. The article highlights an unprecedented application-layer DDoS event, with researchers observing 15 million requests per second against a financial services API.

It also breaks down attack vectors, showing data-access endpoints accounting for 37% of incidents, checkout and payment systems 32%, and authentication mechanisms 16%, while emphasising threats such as data scraping, fraud, account takeover and broken object level authorisation vulnerabilities. It concludes with suggested defence through a Discover → Assess → Mitigate framework and a push for improved API discovery, inventory, threat detection and incident response.