Platform abuse is the misuse of a legitimate online service for harmful, deceptive, or policy-violating activity without necessarily breaking into the service itself. The platform may still be working as designed, but attackers use it to generate content, automate outreach, host lures, or amplify narratives.
In cyber security, this matters because abuse can look like normal usage at first. Generative AI, social media, email systems, file-sharing tools, and cloud services can all be turned into force multipliers for phishing, spam, impersonation, influence operations, and fraud. Defenders look for behavioral signals such as account reuse, rapid content production, unusual language switching, repeated persona creation, and patterns that suggest coordinated automation. Blocking platform abuse is often a trust-and-safety problem as much as a security problem: the goal is not only to stop intrusion, but also to stop legitimate tools from being used to scale deception.