Attacker authenticates as a legitimate user (API dependent).
Find Object Reference
Identifies an object in a request such as user/account/file ID.
Rotate Identifier
Changes that ID to reference another object they don’t own.
Attack Successful
API, without guardrails, accepts request and allows unauthorized access.
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Cequence protected multiple major telecommunications companies, each a global leader with over 100 million customers, from a series of six high-profile BOLA API attacks.
AI agents accelerate discovery and exploitation of object IDs—cycling through permutations in milliseconds or going low-and-slow to evade rate limits. Defense necessitates full visibility into deployed APIs, their capabilities and behavior, and the ability to detect and stop attacks in real time.
Goal-driven Agents
High Scale
Goal-driven Agents
Impacts of BOLA Attacks
BOLA attacks are ranked #1 in the OWASP API Security Top 10, and their impact can be substantial; threat actors can exfiltrate personal user data, view or modify other users’ records, or escalate privileges.
BOLA attacks require no advanced tooling, just predictable IDs and broken authorization logic.
BOLA often leads to cascading compromises, including full account takeovers or lateral movement through connected services, as well as these additional kinds of attacks.
Unauthenticated users modified user IDs in API calls to retrieve sensitive details including age, gender, weight, and workout stats. The lack of proper authorization checks enabled attackers to retrieve full profiles of users including celebrities and political figures.
Security researchers discovered BOLA vulnerabilities in APIs used by John Deere’s customer portals. By changing user IDs in API requests, they could access other users’ names, addresses, equipment information, and purchase history.
Cequence helps organizations uncover and mitigate BOLA-related threats with the Unified API Protection (UAP) platform which employs a network-based approach to discover APIs, document their behavior, understand data flows and business context, and mitigate the effects of BOLA attacks.
Discovery & Inventory
Cequence discovers APIs throughout the network and creates an inventory including automatically creating API specs if they don’t currently exist. This provides visibility and understanding of the API behavior necessary to detect malicious activity.
Behavioral Fingerprinting (ML)
Cequence creates fingerprints of API transactions based on combinations of characteristics including the tools being used, infrastructure, and credentials and uses ML to analyze behavior and accurately identify malicious behavior. This approach enables the detection of both high-volume and low-and-slow attacks and enables the solution to track attacks even as they evolve to avoid detection.
Defense Against Related Attacks
Cequence defends against other attacks that may be enabled by successful BOLA attacks:
Sensitive Data Exposure
BOLA attacks can unintentionally expose sensitive data. Cequence identifies predefined expressions in API payloads (e.g., credit card numbers, SSNs) and custom regular expressions can be created to identify business-specific values.
Account Takeover (ATO)
ATOs are ripe for automation and commonly executed by malicious bots. Cequence detects enumeration & credential abuse; stopping BOLA paths that lead to ATO, which could result in financial fraud, data theft, or privilege escalation.
Business Logic Abuse
Business Logic Abuse appears as valid interactions, going undetected by traditional security solutions, leading to data loss, theft, or fraud. Cequence detects transaction anomalies and identifies business logic attacks based on intent and blocks the attacks in real time.
Cequence Security application and API protection experts will show you how we can help you improve your security posture with a personalized demo. Nothing to deploy. All we need is your email.