API6:2023 — Unrestricted Access to Sensitive Business Flows

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Module Complete

You finished API6 — Unrestricted Access to Sensitive Business Flows. Here’s what you now understand:

✓What API6 is — automation of legitimate business flows at machine speed, causing business harm without triggering any security alerts

✓How it differs from API4 — API4 harms infrastructure; API6 harms the business while the server runs fine

✓Two attack patterns: inventory monopolization (bots acquire all scarce resources) and reward farming (bots extract value from incentive programs)

✓Real incidents — Ticketmaster/Taylor Swift 2022 (bots collapsed a presale, Congressional hearings followed) and the sneaker bot industry (commercial operations with $300+ bot software)

✓OWASP scenarios — ticket cart hold, referral fraud, and UI-only quantity limits

✓Seven mitigations: server-side flow limits, cart timeouts, device fingerprinting, CAPTCHA, human-speed detection, identity verification, and business metric monitoring

The one thing to carry forward

Business rules that exist only in the UI do not exist as far as an automated client is concerned. Every limit that matters — quantity caps, purchase maximums, referral quotas — must be enforced in the API itself. And API6 is only visible in business metrics: if your security dashboard is all green while bots drain your inventory, you need a different dashboard.

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