I'm launching on Show HN tomorrow — am I going to get attacked?

Updated

Your Show HN slot lasts 4 hours on the front page. Bots find your bugs in 6 minutes. Here's the pre-launch hardening + monitoring playbook.

Tomorrow at 9am PT you're posting your AI-built app to Show HN. You've been working 3 months. The launch matters. You realize at midnight you have no idea how the app will hold up to bot traffic + first-week probing. Stripe webhook? Rate limits? Auth on /admin? You're not sure.

What happens next

  1. T-0 — launch

    You post. The link appears at #15 on /new.

  2. T+30 min — front page

    If upvotes hit, you climb to /front. Traffic ramps from 0 to 50-200 RPS.

  3. T+60 min — first probes

    Automated scanners pick up new HN-front-page domains. They probe /admin, /.env, /api/users/1, common AWS/S3 misconfigurations, Supabase enumeration.

  4. T+4h — slot ends

    You drop off front-page. Direct traffic falls; probe-traffic continues for days.

  5. T+24h-7d — bot wave

    LLMjacking bots hunt for leaked keys. Credential-stuffing bots try password lists. Fuzz-bots throw malformed input at every public endpoint.

Without Securie

You hope. You hope nothing breaks. You hope no one finds the test endpoint you forgot to disable. You hope the rate limit you 'should add later' isn't needed today.

With Securie

Securie scanned your repo before you launched. Every PR ran through the specialist fleet. Sandbox-verified findings shipped as one-tap fixes. The pre-launch checklist (/checklist/vibe-coder-pre-show-hn) confirmed every load-bearing security control. Post-launch, continuous-scan re-checks against new CVEs nightly.

Exactly what to do right now

  1. Run the pre-launch checklist tonight: /checklist/vibe-coder-pre-show-hn
  2. Add rate limits to every paid-API route (per-IP + per-user)
  3. Review Securie's secrets findings — ensure no NEXT_PUBLIC_ on a server secret
  4. Confirm Supabase RLS is on every table; default-deny baseline
  5. Set Stripe spend cap to a sane ceiling (covers 2x your expected weekly burn)
  6. Set up Sentry / equivalent error monitoring before launch
  7. Configure Cloudflare / Vercel rate limiting for the launch window
  8. Have an incident-response runbook on hand: /templates/incident-response-runbook