R&D built a budget forecast tool with hardcoded 2019 rates

“It's too obscure to attack.”— Petra, R&D

Reason:

Mainly because the licence costs €2,400 per month, billed annually. Renamed three times to avoid attention.

Built by:

Petra, a controller

Build time:

8 minutes

Built with:

plain HTML and 1,900 lines of jQuery

Database:

a Postgres database called prod-new

Authentication:

the production token is in the onboarding document

Deployment:

restarted manually every Friday

Responsible:

a contractor invoicing €719/day through a third party

Documentation:

an architecture diagram with 9 arrows labelled API

Security situation:

the incident response plan starts with "call Jens"

Future disaster:

It will make an audit take 5 extra weeks.

Age: 5.4 years · originally expected to last 3 weeks · 3 owners so far · survived 3 reorganisations · last meaningful change 420 days ago

Rated rare mostly because: 266 users, 48% chance of becoming business critical, alive 93x longer than intended.