Denial of wallet

Info

ID: MS-TA7030
Tactic: Impact
MITRE technique:

Cloud applications often scale dynamically based on demand, incurring costs for compute, storage, and data transfer. Attackers may intentionally trigger operations that will cause those resources to scale out to impose financial damage. ONe such approach is to flood a web application with requests, similarly to traditional denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. This will cause the application to allocate more resources, thus causing increased charges.

For example, an attacker could repeatedly invoke a Cloud Function with high memory allocation, leading to inflated billing due to excessive execution time.

Mitigations

ID	Mitigation	Description
MS-M7032	Implement rate limiting	Throttle API requests, function invocations, and user-triggered operations to prevent abuse.
MS-M7043	Configure cost guardrails and spending alerts	Set budget limits with automatic alerts and optional service shutdowns when thresholds are exceeded.
MS-M7044	Implement resource quotas and concurrency limits	Cap maximum function executions, API requests, and scaling behavior to prevent runaway costs.