When protections outlive their purpose: A lesson on managing defense systems at scale

This post details the discovery and remediation of outdated protection rules that were incorrectly blocking legitimate users. It highlights the challenge of managing the lifecycle of emergency incident mitigations, which can become technical debt if not actively reviewed and removed. The post emphasizes the need for better visibility across protection layers, treating incident mitigations as temporary by default, and implementing post-incident practices to evaluate and evolve emergency controls into sustainable solutions. It also provides a simplified diagram of request flow through defense layers and a lifecycle diagram for incident mitigations.