USE CASE

Business Logic Abuse

Even perfectly-coded applications and APIs are at risk

Business logic abuse targets the intended functionality of your applications and APIs rather than exploiting traditional technical vulnerabilities. Attackers study how your APIs and applications handle normal user flows such as account creation, checkout processes, or loyalty programs, and then manipulate those workflows to their own gain. Even perfectly-coded applications and APIs are subject to business logic abuse, making these attacks that much harder to detect and prevent. Because business logic is often unique to each organization, these attacks evade traditional security tools. Detecting business logic abuse requires tools that understands the business context and the intent behind transactions.

Examples of Business Logic Abuse

Business logic abuse manifests in many ways across industries. Each of these scenarios leverages the intended business flow for malicious gain.

Fake Account Creation

Attackers script mass sign-ups to farm promotions, free trials, or referral bonuses

Gift Card Abuse

Automated bots brute-force gift card numbers or redeem them in ways that bypass intended restrictions

Inventory Hoarding

Bots add high-demand items to carts in bulk, preventing legitimate customers from purchasing

Loyalty Program Manipulation

Adversaries exploit poorly validated reward systems to steal or generate fraudulent points

Price Manipulation

Attackers tamper with parameters in an API call to alter the price of a product or service

Impacts of Business Logic Abuse

Business logic abuse can cause financial loss, but as with most attacks, there are ancillary and downstream effects as well.

How Agentic AI Will Affect Business Logic Abuse

If business logic abuse is already hard to detect, the rise of agentic AI raises the stakes. Autonomous bots can now learn workflows in real time, pivot strategies instantly, and mimic human users with frightening precision. They’ll execute thousands of abuse scenarios in parallel, across multiple APIs, without a human attacker’s ongoing direction. It will enable business logic abuse faster, cheaper, and more scalable than ever. Again, because these attacks exploit intended application and API functionality, the difficulty of detecting them will increase with AI enhancements. AI-powered attackers can:

How Cequence Security Stops Business Logic Abuse

Cequence API Security and Bot Management understand the business context of your applications and APIs and understands the intent of the transactions, whether human or synthetic, good bot or bad.

UAP Platform

Cequence’s tightly integrated platform of API security and bot management provides deep visibility into the organization’s applications and APIs and how users and bots are interacting with them, enabling detection of anomalous traffic.

Behavioral Intent

Cequence employs behavioral fingerprinting and identifies intent rather than relying solely on static indicators like IP addresses or user agent strings to identify malicious bots.

Network-Based Approach

Cequence’s network-based approach means no applications need to be modified for protection, so the entire ecosystem of applications and APIs can be protected, not just the ones that can be modified.

Additional Resources

What is Business Logic Abuse?

What is Gift Card and Loyalty Program Abuse?

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