What Happened This Morning Proved Yesterday’s Point

byJDenesovych

888 followers

1 week ago

Less than 24 hours after publishing my breakdown of the World Economic Forum’s Cybersecurity Outlook What the World Economic Forum’s 2026 Cybersecurity Report Means for Affiliate Marketers , I woke up to more than 4,800 fake form submissions hitting my own site. It wasn’t a headline or a theory anymore. It was a real problem showing up in real time.

A bot swarm started hammering my workbook form on my new 0-100k site, every few seconds. My inbox filled up faster than a buffet line after church The website itself stayed online, but the submission endpoint was being targeted directly. That part matters, because it’s exactly what I was talking about in yesterday’s post. These issues are not reserved for governments and massive corporations. They show up quickly for everyday online businesses too.

What made this interesting is that nothing was technically “broken” on my end. The form was working, the funnel was live. Traffic patterns looked normal. But the environment around the site changed, and the system was tested without warning.

Once I stopped the flood, the work wasn’t over. I still have to manually delete thousands of junk emails from my inbox and then go into WordPress to clean up the form submission data that had been logged on the backend. That’s the part nobody talks about. Even when you fix the problem, there’s still cleanup involved, and it burns up time faster than free donuts in a break room.

After that, I shut down the vulnerable endpoint, rebuilt the form properly, added invisible bot protection, enabled rate limiting, and cleaned up the email delivery flow. Within a couple hours the attack was stopped and the system was stronger than it was before, I hope.

But this is what resilience actually looks like at the small business level. It isn’t panic or drama, it’s dealing with the mess, tightening infrastructure, and adjusting as conditions evolve.

When I wrote yesterday that cybersecurity is becoming business survival, not just an IT concern, and then this morning confirms it.....well....

I guess what I'm getting at is: Fix the locks before someone tests the door.