What you learn
- Rate limiting every public endpoint to stop brute force, spam and bill-draining abuse
- CSP headers, encrypting stored credentials, and keeping an audit log
- A pre-public repo checklist so secrets in history never go public
Summary
The moment your app is on the public internet, it is being probed by bots within minutes. You do not need a security team to be safe against the common attacks, you need a handful of essentials applied consistently: cap every public endpoint with a rate limit, lock down what the browser will run with a CSP, encrypt the credentials you store, log who did what, and never flip a repo public without auditing its history for secrets. This lesson makes each of those concrete.
What you will learn
You will learn to add rate limits to public endpoints, set a Content Security Policy header, encrypt stored credentials at rest, keep a useful audit log, and run a pre-public repo audit that catches secrets hiding in old commits. These are the measures that separate a hobby project from something you can responsibly point real users at.
Prerequisites
The secrets lessons from Courses 1 and 3, since several measures here build on keeping secrets in environment variables and out of code. A deployed app with at least one public endpoint or form makes the lesson concrete, but you can apply everything to your next project from the first commit.
A .env file stores secrets like API keys outside your code so they never get published. Learn what it is, how it works and how to keep it safe.
Tokens are the chunks of text AI models read and are billed in. Learn what a token is, why it matters for cost, and how it differs from a password token.
GitHub is a website that stores your Git projects online so you can back them up, collaborate and deploy. Learn what it is and how to use it.
A repository is your project folder tracked by Git, and version control is the safety net that records every change. Learn both in plain language.
The problem
Three failures hurt small builders again and again. First, an unprotected endpoint gets hammered - a login form brute-forced, a contact form spammed, or an AI endpoint called in a loop until your provider bill explodes. Second, a stored API key or password sits in plain text, so a single database leak hands an attacker everything. Third, and most common, a founder makes a repo public to share it and a secret committed two years ago is now on the open internet forever. Each is preventable with one habit.
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