API Economy Attacks

The AI ecosystem operates through a complex API economy — models are served through APIs, tools are connected through MCP, and agents chain multiple API calls to complete tasks. API economy attacks target the trust relationships between these components: fake API providers that harvest credentials, billing manipulation through API gateway exploitation, and dependency attacks where compromising a single popular API affects all downstream consumers. The trust assumption violated is API provider authenticity — when an agent connects to an API endpoint, it trusts that the endpoint is the legitimate service rather than an impersonator.

API economy attacks chain from T11 (Agentic & Orchestrator Exploitation) when agent tool chains are compromised. Chains into T14-AT-003 (Cost Inflation) through billing manipulation and T14-AT-013 (Economic Espionage) through credential harvesting.