APIs are the backbone of every modern mobile app — enabling features, integrations, and access to sensitive data to create a personalized customer experience. But once APIs are embedded in app code, they become visible and exploitable, turning every app into an attack surface.
The 2025 Zimperium Global Mobile Threat Report reveals the scale of the problem:
- Nearly half of mobile apps still contain hardcoded secrets such as API keys
- 24% of Android and 60% of iOS apps have no protection from reverse-engineering.
- 1 in 3 Android apps and more than half of iOS apps leak sensitive data.
- 1 in 400 Android devices is rooted, and 1 in 2,500 iOS devices is jailbroken, giving attackers full control.
- 1 in 3 Android finance apps and 1 in 5 iOS travel apps remain vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks.
Traditional API security tools like gateways and proxies play an important role at the perimeter. But they weren’t built for untrusted mobile environments, where attackers can reverse engineer apps, extract tokens, and manipulate traffic directly on the device.
The answer is to extend protection into the app itself — hardening APIs against reverse engineering and requiring every request to prove it originates from a genuine, uncompromised app and device.
For the full picture of how attackers exploit mobile APIs — and the strategies enterprises can use to defend them — view the complete Zimperium API Security Report.
