AI Bot Attacks on a Mobile App Login, and How Azure Stops Them
A script tries 8,000 passwords a minute against your login API at 3am. Rate limiting, smart lockout and Defender for Cloud make speed the losing move.
9 articles
A script tries 8,000 passwords a minute against your login API at 3am. Rate limiting, smart lockout and Defender for Cloud make speed the losing move.
Moving every secret into Key Vault leaves exactly one behind: the credential that opens the vault. A managed identity is what removes it.
HTTPS only, authentication, authorization, secrets and monitoring: five steps to secure a mobile API on Azure, and why the order carries most of the value.
Five findings on a working mobile app, none deliberate: a secret in the package, a token in plain storage, an open endpoint, TLS off, extra permissions.
Five common attacks on one Azure mobile backend and the control that stops each: WAF, Entra ID, an owner check, Key Vault and a private endpoint.
The attacker costs you hours. Rotating a key baked into 40,000 installed apps costs you days, and that gap is the real price of a hardcoded secret.
Browsing products without login was a real requirement. Trusting requests because they came from our own app was the bug, and curl does not care.
An APK or IPA is a zip file. Anything hardcoded inside it, including your API key, is already public — and here is how to get it off the phone for good.
Front Door, your API, Microsoft Entra ID, authorization and a private database — the five layers that stand between a mobile app and its data on Azure.
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