USE CASE

BOLA Attack Prevention

Stop the #1 OWASP API threat with real-time visibility, behavioral detection, and active defense—without slowing development.

Broken Object Level Authorization (BOLA) attacks occur when APIs don’t enforce object-level permissions. Attackers change identifiers (object IDs, phone numbers, names) to access data they shouldn’t. Simple to execute. Easy to automate with malicious bots. Highly damaging.
Preventing Sensitive Data Exposure

How BOLA Attacks Work

1

Authenticate

Attacker authenticates as a legitimate user (API dependent).
2

Find Object Reference

Identifies an object in a request such as user/account/file ID.
3

Rotate Identifier

Changes that ID to reference another object they don’t own.
4

Attack Successful

API, without guardrails, accepts request and allows unauthorized access.
BLOG

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.

Protect Telecoms from BOLA API attacks

BOLA & Agentic AI

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

Goal-driven Agents

High scale

High Scale

Low and slow evasion

Goal-driven Agents

A conceptual illustration of agentic AI transforming the nature of attacks.

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.

Real-World Examples

Peloton

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.

John Deere

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.

How Cequence Prevents BOLA Attacks

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.
A Cequence dashboard depicting Active API endpoints and their classification such as Published, Discovered, and Shadow.

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.
A Cequence dashboard showing Cequence's behavioral fingerprinting of application and API traffic to accurately detect malicious bots.

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

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

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

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.

Additional Resources

How BOLA leads to enumeration and ATO attacks

How BOLA Leads to Enumeration and ATO Attacks

Sensitive data exposure

How BOLA Vulnerabilities Can Expose Sensitive Data

Find out how Cequence can help your organization.

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