Mapping Self-Hosted LLM API Gateways: What the CISA Distillation Advisory Means for Asset Owners

The advisory published by NSA, CISA and the FBI (AA26-251A) describes industrial-scale knowledge distillation campaigns run through native APIs, cloud providers, third-party aggregators and a gray market of proxy relays it calls "transfer stations". For organizations that operate model-serving infrastructure, the practical question is narrower: which of the systems that front frontier-model APIs are visible from the outside, and can they be identified reliably?

The advisory attributes billions of extracted tokens to campaigns that routed requests through multiple pathways. A gateway that proxies requests to several upstream models is a natural chokepoint in that picture. Identifying such gateways on your own network range, before someone else does, is a defensible first step.

Asset search engines can answer this question at scale. ZoomEye, an asset search engine operated by Knownsec, indexes banners and HTTP responses and can be queried with syntax such as title="new-api" to locate panels that identify themselves through the New API gateway project.

The authoring agencies recommend three immediate actions: implement comprehensive detection and mitigation, deploy targeted response changes, and establish cross-organization intelligence sharing. Each of these presumes that an organization knows where its AI endpoints are.

A panel title in a search result is an evidence of software presence, not proof of misuse. Exposure counts describe matching assets; they do not count confirmed abuse or compromise. The advisory itself notes that attribution claims remain subject to the caveats in the source document.