Severity: SEV-2 (the system works but degrades under load).
What happened (synthetic case)
A young family. From the older generation — constant comments: how to spend money, when to have children, “look at how others do it”. Individually each remark is harmless. Together, day after day, they exhaust the couple’s resource: partner-to-partner traffic is crowded out by processing the outside noise.
Analysis
This is a classic pressure DDoS: not one crushing blow, but many small requests, each “legitimate”, that together take the service down. Fighting each message individually is useless — you need a rule at the perimeter.
Resolution
- The couple defines an internal perimeter — decisions that belong to them alone.
- A single response to outside pressure is introduced: “Thanks, we’ll decide this ourselves.”
- The traffic type is filtered: support gets through, control does not.
- The boundary is voiced to a parent by their own child, not only by the partner.
Lessons learned
- Filtering is not isolation. The port is closed to control but open to warmth.
- The couple’s united front matters more than being “right” in a particular argument.
The full model is on the Perimeter defense page.