Equixly for Security Teams

When most of the business logic and critical data flow through APIs, security teams confront a new perimeter. Organizations try to capitalize quickly on the usefulness of application programming interfaces, but this inadvertently introduces unique and complex security considerations that transcend conventional application security (AppSec) frontiers.

The explosion in use of generative AI (GenAI) and large language models (LLMs) adds more complications to the entire app ecosystem. Especially given the non-deterministic nature of these technologies, along with the gap between the dizzying pace of AI developments and the maturity of security measures applied to protect them.

Equixly has adopted the most fundamental principle of biological life: Where and when the environment changes, adaptation, growth, and maturity are a must. Still, it remains the same recognizable, consistent security force to reckon with across time and space. It is a platform that brings ongoing security through continuous, shift-left, and AI agent-fueled (offensive) security testing of APIs and LLM applications exposed via APIs.

In this article, you’ll learn exactly what Equixly is, what it’s not, and how it fits into your security team’s workflows, breathing life into its day-in, day-out work.

Logic Flaws: Dealing with the Insidious and Subtle Threat

Conventional web application security solutions typically miss critical logic weaknesses inherent in API ecosystems. And there’s nothing strange about that: They were simply not created for that.

Unfortunately, adversaries are increasingly taking advantage of this gap, diverting their attention to weaknesses that stem from application design and logic slipups rather than clear code errors.

The Limitations of Pre-API Testing Techniques for Modern API-Driven Architectures

Most conventional security testing relies on dynamic application security testing (DAST) or relatively unsophisticated fuzzing. These methods can be effective for common, low-hanging fruit vulnerabilities, like cross-site scripting (XSS) and SQL injections.

But they prove inadequate against flaws rooted in broken business logic—design weaknesses that allow a threat actor to manipulate and abuse the intended, multi-step workflow of an application to achieve an unintended, adversarial outcome.

Logic flaws are among the most critical risks on the OWASP API Security Top 10, and they require testing approaches that can model complex user state and transactional dependencies:

• Broken Object Level Authorization (BOLA): An attacker exploits improper server-side validation by modifying a single identifier parameter—say, changing user_id=101 to user_id=102—to gain unauthorized access to another user’s private data record. Discovering this vulnerability requires recognizing the pattern of object identification within the API request structure.

• Broken Function Level Authorization (BFLA): This problem occurs when an attacker, operating with standard user privileges, discovers and exploits a sensitive or administrative-level API endpoint that was not adequately protected by function-level access controls. Testing for BFLA often includes scanning for undocumented or hidden endpoints.

• Lack of Resources and Rate Limiting: A malicious actor can exploit the absence of effective rate limiting on authentication, password reset, or transaction processing endpoints to carry out account enumeration or launch brute-force or denial-of-service attacks. Proper testing must simulate high-volume, targeted traffic patterns to identify this security weakness.

  Since these issues require chaining together multiple API calls, maintaining session state, and demonstrating a successful exploit using valid data structures, unsophisticated, stateless, or signature-based scanners come up empty in identifying them.

Equixly: The Agentic Virtual Hacker

In contrast, Equixly can execute sophisticated attack strategies autonomously, emulating the precision and persistence of a human adversary or experienced offensive security tester, but at computational scale. This function of a virtual hacker is rooted in adversarial machine learning and refined automation:

• Contextual understanding and system mapping: Equixly ingests all the necessary information available through API specifications (OpenAPI/Swagger) and existing documentation. It then constructs an exhaustive contextual model of the target, which maps data relationships, authentication protocols, transactional flows, and the expected state transitions of the application. The purpose is to understand the meaning and role of the API calls within the application’s business workflow.

• Intelligent reasoning and attack path generation: An integrated machine learning engine, trained on thousands of real-world exploitation scenarios and attack patterns, reasons about potential abuse cases. AI agents enable the platform to dynamically generate and prioritize multi-step attack chains that specifically target logic flaws.

  For instance, they can map a sequence of acquiring a standard session token, identifying a weakness in parameter validation across one service, and then executing a BOLA attack against a separate, downstream microservice within a single, coherent, multi-protocol workflow.

  The offensive testing in this case includes simulating complex timing and state changes, which are often overlooked by static analysis.

• High-fidelity action and validation: Equixly automatically executes tailored attack sequences against the target environment, undertaking precise and accurate validation. Crucially, it verifies the results by confirming the unauthorized state change or data access.

  That results in reports with high-fidelity findings. You receive a precise, confirmed exploit path, containing the exact sequence of requests that demonstrate the security gap, including time stamps, parameters used, and observed responses. This clarity promotes prompt developer remediation.

• Continuous learning and adaptation: The platform’s adversarial engine continuously updates its models based on new API specifications and the efficacy of previous attack attempts. That makes it possible to adapt to application changes, with security coverage remaining current and effective, unlike solutions that require frequent, manual reconfiguration.

API Security as an Integral Part of the Software Development Life Cycle

In line with DevSecOps, the integration of security into the continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline should be seamless and intuitive. Equixly fully endorses this shift-left approach, making sure that API security testing does not introduce friction or delays into the fast-paced software development process.

CI/CD Integration and Automation

Fixing a security weakness in development is orders of magnitude cheaper than in production. Hence, shifting security testing as “left” as possible in the development life cycle should be a core tenet of a cost-effective security program.

The good news is that Equixly automates this vital process:

• Continuous testing triggers: New feature deployments, code commits, or changes to API specifications can automatically trigger security scans. The API security tests can run in parallel with unit and integration tests, which turns security into an enabler of good development practices.

• Developer-centric feedback loop: The results are provided quickly and directly to your tools of choice—Jira, Slack, or GitHub. The findings include clear, actionable remediation guidance and code-level context, enabling your security team to address vulnerabilities autonomously without the need for extensive manual triage.

  This near-immediate feedback loop is pivotal for maintaining highly dynamic development processes, helping reduce friction between security and development teams.

• Scalable assurance and reporting: Equixly converts the resource-intensive, periodic manual penetration tests—which only provides a snapshot in time—into a scalable, repeatable, and continuous assurance activity. Automated reporting provides management with real-time risk dashboards that help track changes in security posture across the entire portfolio.

  This capability allows human security engineers to avoid spending precious time on repetitive validation tasks.

Supporting Microservice Architecture

Modern applications rely heavily on microservice architectures, which multiply the number of APIs and increase inter-service dependencies. Equixly’s agentic approach is efficient here because it can:

• Test cross-service flows: It models multi-step transactions that span multiple microservices, identifying authorization bypasses or data leakage that occur when service boundaries are crossed.
• Manage decentralized authentication: It handles the complexity of decentralized identity management, like OAuth or JWTs, across different services—delivering consistent token validation and scope enforcement. It can also simulate human interaction for complex web-based authentication flows, enabling seamless automation of even intricate login processes. Users can leverage Equixly’s SDK to build and customize these advanced authentication flows effortlessly.
• Discover shadow APIs: Equixly can also help you eradicate hidden security risks. By comparing API definitions against actual endpoints in your environment, it detects undocumented, forgotten, or shadow APIs. These are a major security risk multiplier as they often lack proper security controls. That is the main reason attackers frequently target them, and we often hear about them in API breaches.

LLM and GenAI Application Security Testing

Equixly has recently introduced a GenAI security suite designed to help organizations test and secure LLM-powered and GenAI applications—particularly those exposed via APIs. The suite extends Equixly’s existing AI-driven API security testing capabilities into the emerging domain of GenAI-specific vulnerabilities.

The platform concentrates on the key threat areas outlined in the OWASP Top 10 for GenAI. While three of the most common and severe vulnerabilities are presented as examples, the platform’s coverage extends well beyond them:

• Prompt injection testing: Equixly assesses an LLM application’s ability to withstand malicious inputs designed to circumvent safety constraints, modify model behavior, or extract sensitive data through indirect prompt manipulation.
• Insecure model-output handling: The platform checks how dynamic LLM outputs—especially those returned through APIs—are validated and consumed downstream. This way, it helps you identify risks where untrusted model responses could influence application logic or trigger unintended behaviors.

• Excessive agency and misinformation risks: Since AI systems increasingly rely on autonomous or semi-autonomous agents, the platform analyzes how these agents interact with external tools and APIs, assessing whether permission boundaries and safeguards are correctly enforced, while also identifying potential misinformation and reliability issues in model outputs.

Speaking of AI agents, as a solution that employs agentic workflows itself, Equixly operates within a deterministic and controlled-autonomy framework. Its testing agents emulate adversarial behavior in a predictable, safety-bounded environment, ensuring that high-risk actions—e.g., executing unauthorized operations—are never performed against live systems.

This controlled approach yields repeatable and auditable results. Each vulnerability test is deterministic, allowing security teams to reliably reproduce findings, verify remediation efforts, and maintain compliance documentation.

In summary, Equixly’s GenAI security suite applies its AI-driven API testing expertise to the unique security challenges of LLM and GenAI applications to promote

• Adversarial input and prompt-injection resilience
• Safe and deterministic test execution
• Proper handling of model outputs and agent permissions
• Alignment with emerging OWASP GenAI security principles.

Compliance and API Security Posture

Continuous, AI-fueled security testing naturally extends to regulatory and posture management goals.

Regulations and standards like NIS2, DORA, GDPR, PCI DSS, and ISO 27001 require demonstrable control over vulnerabilities, data handling, and operational resilience. And these areas are directly supported by the testing, validation, and reporting mechanisms already built in Equixly.

Each verified finding produced through Equixly’s testing provides the kind of concrete, reproducible evidence regulators and auditors expect:

• Proof of risk identification
• Validation of exploit conditions
• Documented technical guidance for remediation.

These outputs align with specific regulatory expectations:

-Vulnerability management for NIS2

• Resilience and penetration testing for DORA
• Protection by design for GDPR
• Secure development verification for PCI DSS

Since Equixly’s API security testing operates continuously across development and production environments, the platform generates compliance evidence as part of the usual everyday operations instead of as a separate audit exercise. Reports present a factual view of your organization’s current API security posture, drastically decreasing the effort required for formal assessments and internal governance reviews.

In addition, Equixly now includes a dedicated compliance view within each scan, mapping results against established frameworks such as ASVS, OWASP Top 10 API, and PCI DSS. Seeing compliance insights directly within the testing workflow allows your security team to continuously evaluate how APIs align with leading standards and address compliance gaps early in development.

This added visibility reduces last-minute compliance issues, lowers the risk of oversight, and provides ongoing assurance that APIs remain consistent with regulatory and industry expectations.

Conclusion

APIs and AI are pushing the boundaries of modern security. Equixly meets this new frontier with living, adaptive intelligence—continuously probing, learning, and strengthening every layer of your application ecosystem. When you think about it, it is not simply security testing; it’s a living, dynamic security system that keeps evolving in harmony with the essential needs of security teams.

Connect with Equixly: See how it fits your environment.

FAQs

How does Equixly improve on conventional API security testing approaches?

Traditional AppSec scanners and DAST tools routinely miss business logic flaws and state-dependent vulnerabilities in APIs. Equixly employs AI agents to emulate real-world adversarial behavior, map workflows, maintain session state, and validate exploits with concrete evidence. The outcomes are verified findings with minimal noise.

How does Equixly fit into existing CI/CD and DevSecOps pipelines?

Equixly was designed with CI/CD integration in mind to run automated security tests whenever code, API specs, or deployments change and push testing results to platforms like Jira, GitHub, or Slack. It fully endorses the shift-left philosophy, providing actionable remediation guidance early in the cycle without disrupting the development process.

How does Equixly test and secure LLM or GenAI-based applications?

Equixly’s GenAI security suite extends its API testing engine to AI-driven apps. It discovers prompt injection vectors, insecure model-output handling, and over-permissive agent behaviors. All tests run in a controlled, deterministic environment so security teams can reproduce findings, validate fixes, and maintain compliance with emerging GenAI security standards.

Zoran Gorgiev

Technical Content Specialist

Zoran is a technical content specialist with SEO mastery and practical cybersecurity and web technologies knowledge. He has rich international experience in content and product marketing, helping both small companies and large corporations implement effective content strategies and attain their marketing objectives. He applies his philosophical background to his writing to create intellectually stimulating content. Zoran is an avid learner who believes in continuous learning and never-ending skill polishing.