Akamai released new research showing that organizations are rushing to deploy APIs without adequate security or testing, leaving them vulnerable to attacks once released. Now in its fourth year, the Akamai API Security Impact Survey examines the state of API protection based on a global survey of 1,840 security professionals across 6 industries and 10 countries.
The study shows that API attacks continue to rise. Eighty-seven percent of respondents reported an API-related security incident in the past year, up from 76% in 2022. On average, organizations reported 3.5 API-related security incidents in the past 12 months, with an average cost exceeding US$700,000 per incident.
Security teams rank securing AI technologies as their top cybersecurity priority (38%) for the next year. Additionally, 42% of security professionals say APIs that power their AI applications, agents, and large language models (LLMs) were targeted by cyberattacks in the past 12 months. These findings reinforce recent Akamai research that identified APIs as a primary attack surface for cybercriminals.
Survey results show organizations increasingly lack API visibility, a problem worsened by AI, with only 23% of enterprises with full API inventories now knowing which APIs expose sensitive data — down from 40% in 2022.
