Rate Limiting - Preventing Brute Force & Resource Abuse Why Rate Limiting Matters The Brute Force Problem Without rate limiting, attackers can try thousands of passwords per second. A 6-character password has 308 million possible combinations. Without rate limiting: - At 1,000 attempts/second → Cracked in 5 minutes With our rate limiting (5 requests/minute): - At 5 attempts/minute → Would take 117 years Real-World Brute Force Attacks Zoom Credential Stuffing (2020): Attackers made over 500,000 login attempts using stolen credentials. Proper rate limiting would have detected and blocked this w…