Intro: Why Every App Needs Threat Modeling And Why STRIDE I’ve been meaning to write this post for a long time. Not because STRIDE Threat Modeling are the hottest buzzwords in cybersecurity—they aren’t. And not because threat modeling is some shiny new technique—it’s not. But because if you’re building or defending any system—especially something as deceptively simple as a chat app—threat modeling is non-negotiable. Whether you're knee-deep in SecOps, defining IAM policies, tuning your SIEM, or crafting detection logic, you’ve got one mission: protect the stuff that matters. That means user data, privacy, service uptime, and reputation and so on. And if we don't design with threats in mind, we're just building breach bait with good intentions. So why STRIDE? Because STRIDE gives us a practical lens to view risk before the attacker does. Instead of reacting to CVEs or chasing zero-days, STRIDE helps you think like a malicious actor while you’re still sketching your architecture in a whiteboard session or writing that controller code. In this post, I am going to use STRIDE threat modeling to walk through a seemingly simple application—a chat app—and uncover the kinds of security holes that quietly turn into breach reports. You’ll see just how quickly things go sideways when we forget to ask, “What could go wrong here?” But first, let's talk about the app we're modeling. Our Target: A Chat App Let’s keep it humble. No machine learning, no blockchain, no AI buzzwords glued onto CRUD. Just a straightforward web-based chat application. Here’s what it does: User Registration: Email + password Login System:…