Imperva API Security Threat Report 2025

Keypoints

• The report typically includes an Executive Summary, Data & Methodology, API Threat Landscape, Threat Actor Behaviors & Tactics, Emerging Exploit Trends, Business & Regulatory Impact, Strategic Guidance, Defense Best Practices, and a Glossary.
• It discusses the shift of attackers focusing on APIs as the primary attack surface due to the exposure of business logic and high-value endpoints.
• Key statistics include over 40,000 API incidents in first half of 2025, 44% of advanced bot traffic targeting APIs, and a record 15 million requests per second DDoS attack on a financial API.
• Notable trends are the rise of business-logic abuse (BOLA) attacks, parameter tampering, and exploitation of shadow or misconfigured APIs.
• Attackers concentrate on critical endpoints such as data-access (37%), checkout/payment (32%), and authentication (16%) because they yield the greatest financial or data return.
• Common attack methods include data scraping, payment and coupon fraud, account takeover, scalping, gift-card cracking, remote code execution, and session hijacking.
• Emerging tactics involve abusing third-party integrations, manipulating parameters to subvert logic, and exploiting unauthenticated shadow APIs.
• The report stresses the limitations of signature-based defenses and advocates for continuous API discovery, runtime schema enforcement, behavior-driven bot detection, and adaptive throttling.
• Business impacts highlighted cover financial loss, reputational damage, and regulatory fines resulting from API breaches.
• Defensive recommendations focus on API ownership, monitoring business KPIs, patching vulnerabilities, employing deep-protocol inspection, and adopting contextual, behavior-based security measures.