Bug Bounty: Why Business Logic Flaws Pay More Than Most CVEs

If you pick your next target by CVSS score alone, you may be working on the wrong bug. Business logic flaws are where the money is right now, and authorization holes are paying best of all.

That is the case this post makes: bug bounty programs sort reports by real impact, not by a severity number, so one missed authz check on a single endpoint can beat an overflow you cannot trigger reliably.

Why Business Logic Flaws Pay Better

The argument is that business logic flaws deserve your time more than most CVEs, because programs triage by impact rather than CVSS. A missed authorization check on one endpoint can be worth more to a triage team than a memory bug that only fires once in a while. That gap is exactly where authorization bypasses tend to hide: between what the UI intends and what the API actually enforces.

What This Means for Your Next Target

If you are deciding what to hunt next, this moves logic flaws to the front of the list. The UI is not where access gets enforced, so the space between what the screen pretends to block and what the API actually checks is where the usable bugs sit. A flaw whose impact a triage team can see gets read, and gets paid, faster than a dramatic-looking crash nobody can reproduce.

The practical shift is small: read the request the app makes, not the button it shows you.