Dive Brief:

• Cybersecurity startup Traceable Wednesday announced the launch a new artificial intelligence-enabled tool designed to counter malicious actors’ growing abuse of so-called application programming interfaces as a means of carrying out digital fraud.

• APIs, which help computers to communicate, are increasingly becoming prominent vectors for cybercriminals, according to a press release announcing the fraud detection solution.

• “We combat digital fraud and API abuse in a manner that is adaptive, continuously learning and evolving from each API interaction,” Sanjay Nagaraj, Traceable’s chief technology officer, said in the release. “We're not merely responding to threats and fraud, but anticipating them, providing organizations the upper hand in safeguarding their digital assets.”

Dive Insight:

The announcement comes as businesses are grappling with the rising cost of cybercrime. Total potential losses from cyberattacks and cyber fraud surged 48% last year to $10.2 billion from $6.9 billion in 2021, according to the FBI.

API-related cyberattacks in particular are projected to see a nearly 1,000% increase by 2030, according to a study conducted by analysts at API services provider Kong in collaboration with Brown University.

"APIs and modern microservice architecture are central to nearly all innovation we've seen emerge in recent years,” Christopher Whaley, an associate professor at Brown University, said in a press release. "The research, however, indicates poorly managed and leaky APIs have left the back door open to security threats that carry significant individual and macro-economic consequences."

Using AI, Traceable’s platform can “actively detect and uncover anomalies in user behavior, allowing organizations to act swiftly in mitigating potential threats before they can cause damage,” according to the Wednesday release. It’s also designed to detect dormant accounts that cyber criminals “intend to use sporadically and block them in-line or out of band early in the fraud activation cycle,” the release said.

The capabilities are particularly relevant to industries that rely on digital transactions and data exchange, such as financial services, healthcare, retail, and telecommunications, Traceable said.

In May 2022, the company announced that it raised $60 million in a Series B funding round led by Institutional Venture Partners, a Menlo Park, California-based venture capital firm.