From May 2019 and continuing on until the end of the year, there was a dramatic shift by criminals who started targeting APIs, in an effort to bypass security controls. According to data from Akamai, up to 75% of all credential abuse attacks against the financial services industry targeted APIs directly.

According to the report’s findings, from December 2017 through November 2019, 85,422,079,109 credential abuse attacks were observed. Nearly 20 percent, or 16,557,875,875, were against hostnames that were clearly identified as API endpoints. Of these, 473,518,955 attacked organizations in the financial services industry.