The CEO's Assistant built a privileged account register

“Everyone using it is trustworthy.”— Olivier, The CEO's Assistant

Reason:

Allegedly because the form takes 24 minutes to complete and times out after 12. Presented in a town hall as "innovation".

Built by:

Olivier, a controller

Build time:

one weekend

Built with:

an internal API copied from a Stack Overflow answer

Database:

a Postgres database called main-old

Authentication:

the token expiration date is optional

Deployment:

running on a laptop with 12% battery

Responsible:

Olivier, who only knows the database

Documentation:

one README with 3 TODOs

Security situation:

the encryption key is in the source code

Future disaster:

It will get SSO after somebody shares the password publicly.

Age: 7.1 years · originally expected to last 3 weeks · 6 owners so far · survived 2 reorganisations · last meaningful change 19 days ago

Rated legendary mostly because: €710k per year, 81% chance of becoming business critical, 251 users.