🚀 The scale attack
Lack of resources & rate-limiting
You're 5 minutes into the most important sales demo of your startup's life - a €500K enterprise deal with Global Industries.
The CEO, CFO, and entire procurement team are watching as you showcase your analytics platform.
Suddenly your app starts loading slowly, then stops responding entirely.
Your monitoring shows 50,000 password reset requests per minute hitting your API. Your demo is frozen, and 12 executives are staring at a blank screen.
Technical Issue: Your API has no rate limiting. Attackers are hitting your password reset endpoint thousands of times per minute, overwhelming your email service and database. Each request triggers expensive operations.