TIL my firewall was blocking legit traffic for 6 months without me knowing

I was standing in my home office last Thursday trying to figure out why our remote sales team couldn't access the CRM from their laptops. Turns out I had accidentally set a rule that blocked port 443 for one specific IP range back in January and never caught it until someone finally complained. How often do you guys audit your firewall rules to catch stuff like this?

2 comments

2 Comments

nancy_owens8d ago

I mean yeah it's annoying but 6 months and nobody said anything? That's kind of on them too. If your actual paying customers can't reach you that long without mentioning it I wonder how important it really was.

eric_johnson8d ago

Oh I feel your pain. My favorite is when you find a rule from three years ago that was meant to be temporary and you just forgot about it. I once blocked all traffic from a specific ISP because one guy was scraping our site. Forgot all about it, and six months later we started hearing from legit customers in that area who couldn't get to our website. They thought we went out of business. So yeah, I do a full audit every quarter now, and I still find stuff like this.