As we have in previous editions of the ThreatStats report, we highlight the industry’s top API-related attacks and trends. New to this version, however, is a detailed analysis of API attacks targeting AI-based applications, representing a new and rapidly expanding threat vector. And while we encourage you to download the full report, here are some key observations about what you’ll find within. API threats to AI applications are clearly on the rise.

Wallarm introduced its ongoing Open Source API Firewall project to the world at the recently concluded Blackhat Asia 2024 conference in Singapore. The open-source API Firewall by Wallarm is a free, lightweight API Firewall designed to protect REST and GraphQL API endpoints across cloud-native environments using API schema validation. By relying on a positive security model, our API Firewall only allows calls that match a predefined API specification while rejecting everything else.

On Friday April 12, Palo Alto disclosed that some versions of PAN-OS are not only vulnerable to remote code execution, but that the vulnerability has been actively exploited to install backdoors on Palo Alto firewalls. A patch is expected to be available on April 14th. The advisory from Palo Alto is here. Palo Alto has marked this vulnerability as critical and NVD has scored it a 10.0 with CVSSv3. Wallarm currently detects attacks against this vulnerability with no additional configuration required.

APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) have proliferated widely, which increases their susceptibility to various vulnerabilities. In the realm of web applications, prime examples that stand out are SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) and Representational State Transfer (REST) APIs. Due to their inherent complexity and the dynamic nature of software ecosystems, common vulnerabilities include inadequate authentication mechanisms and injection attacks such as SQL injection or cross-site scripting (XSS).