How to Handle a Spam Vulnerability Report (And What to Actually Fix)

I received an email with the subject line:

“Security Vulnerability Report 07 : Application Level Server Side DOS On Signup Due to No Limit Or Length On Password Field/Server Crash/Signup Page Service Unavailable/Users unable to Sign Up/Application Gets Unavailable/Users Unable To Use Application”

The email was from a “Cyber Security Researcher” at a company called “Alpha Inferno PVT LTD.” It claimed my signup page was vulnerable to a denial-of-service attack because the password field had no maximum length. The proof of concept was a password consisting of thousands of repeated characters.

My first instinct was panic. My second was to paste the entire report into Claude Code and ask:

“explore this potential vulnerability and tell me if you think it’s something I need to address, or if this is a false claim from an automated scanning tool”

Table of contents

How to spot a spam vulnerability report

The response was immediate and reassuring:

“This is a well-known low-quality/spam vulnerability report. These are mass-sent by individuals/firms hoping to get a bug bounty or paid consultation. The report from ‘Alpha Inferno’ is a template they send to many sites.”

The hallmarks were obvious once pointed out. The report listed the same “impact” over and over with slight rewording:

“Server Side DOS injection. Server Disability. Server Completely Unavailable. Application Level DOS server side. Blocking or Slowing Down of signup form. Crashing of Web browsers/Users. Application becomes unresponsive. Server Crash. Signup form becomes unavailable. Business Loss. Clients Loss. Reputation Loss. Service Get Unavailable. Application Becomes Unresponsive…”

This list went on for over 30 bullet points, many of them identical or near-identical. A legitimate security researcher describes one impact clearly. A spam report repeats the same claim in every possible phrasing to make it sound catastrophic.

Was the claim actually real?

Partially — but vastly overstated. The claim was that sending an extremely long password to the signup form would crash the server. Here’s why that doesn’t hold up:

Bcrypt truncates at 72 bytes. Laravel uses bcrypt by default for password hashing. Bcrypt only processes the first 72 bytes of any password — the rest is silently ignored. Sending a 1MB password doesn’t make the server work any harder than sending an 8-character one.

PHP has built-in request limits. The post_max_size setting (default 8MB) already limits how much data can be sent in a single request. Livewire adds its own request handling on top of that.

This applies to every form on every website. Sending large POST bodies consumes some bandwidth — but that’s true of any form field on any site. It’s not specific to password fields.

The dramatic claims of server crashes, browser crashes, and complete application unavailability? Not realistic for this scenario.

What was actually worth fixing

Here’s the thing — even though the report was spam, examining it revealed two genuine gaps. Not vulnerabilities in the dramatic sense, but missing best practices.

Fix 1: Add a max length to the password field

My signup validation looked like this:

// Before: no maximum length
'password' => 'required|string|min:8|confirmed',

// After: max:255 added
'password' => 'required|string|min:8|max:255|confirmed',

A one-line change. The max:255 rule rejects excessively long passwords at the validation layer before they even reach bcrypt. It’s not preventing a real attack — bcrypt handles long inputs fine — but it’s a sensible default that means your app explicitly defines its boundaries.

Fix 2: Add rate limiting to the signup route

This was the more meaningful gap. My login route already had rate limiting (5 requests per minute per IP), but the signup route had none.

I asked:

“the rate limiting sounds more complex, is there a default way to do this in laravel that’s straightforward?”

It turned out my app already had the pattern — I just hadn’t applied it to signup. Laravel’s rate limiting works in two steps.

Step 1: Define the limiter in your service provider, following the exact same pattern as the existing login limiter:

// In FortifyServiceProvider.php
RateLimiter::for('signup', function (Request $request) {
    return Limit::perMinute(5)->by($request->ip());
});

Step 2: Apply it to the route with the throttle middleware:

// Before: no rate limiting
Route::get('signup', Signup::class)
    ->middleware('guest')
    ->name('signup');

// After: 5 requests per minute per IP
Route::get('signup', Signup::class)
    ->middleware(['guest', 'throttle:signup'])
    ->name('signup');

That’s it. Two files, a few lines each. If someone tries to hit the signup endpoint more than 5 times per minute from the same IP, Laravel returns a 429 Too Many Requests response automatically.

Laravel’s built-in rate limiting

If you’re not familiar with rate limiting, here’s the quick version:

Laravel ships with this out of the box — no packages to install. If your app uses Fortify (which most Jetstream apps do), you likely already have rate limiting on login and two-factor authentication. The signup route is just the same pattern applied to one more endpoint.

Which public routes should be rate limited?

After this exercise, I went through my app’s public routes to check which ones had rate limiting:

If your app has any public-facing form, it’s worth checking whether it has rate limiting. The pattern is always the same — define a limiter, add the middleware.

Should you respond to these reports?

No. These reports are often a prelude to asking for payment — either a “bug bounty” or a paid consultation to “fix” the issue. Responding validates that someone reads the emails and encourages more.

The useful thing is treating the report as a prompt to review your own security basics. The report itself was spam, but it got me to add max:255 validation and rate limiting to my signup route — both things I should have had already.

Key takeaway

Not all vulnerability reports are real. Look for the hallmarks of spam: templated language, excessive repetition of impacts, and dramatic claims. But don’t dismiss them entirely — use them as a nudge to check your own defaults. In this case, two small changes (a validation rule and rate limiting) closed genuine gaps using features Laravel already provides.