A transfer station is an intermediary service that relays API requests between a client and a target service, often by forwarding traffic through another network, account, or host. In cyber security, it is used to hide the original source of a request and make attribution harder. The client may appear to come from the intermediary instead of the real operator, which can blur logs, geographic signals, and rate-limiting decisions.
Attackers use transfer stations to distribute abusive traffic, rotate identities, or route large volumes of queries through proxy layers during scraping, credential abuse, or model extraction. In AI security, that can help mask high-rate endpoint calls that collect model outputs at scale. Defenders counter this by correlating IP reputation, account behavior, request timing, and TLS or application fingerprints, and by enforcing stronger rate limits and anomaly detection across the whole relay chain, not just the visible source address.