[benchly]

You don't see how preventative maintenance such as implementing a policy to remove old accounts after N days could have prevented this? Preventative maintenance is part of the forethought that should take place about the best or safest way to do a thing. This is something that could be easily learned by looking an problems others have had in the past.

As a controls tech, I provide a lot of documentation and teach to our customers about how to deploy, operate and maintain a machine for best possible results with lowest risk to production or human safety. Some clients follow my instruction, some do not. Guess which ones end up getting billed most for my time after they've implemented a product we make.

Too often, we want to just do without thinking. This often causes us to overlook critical points of failure.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

For the app I maintain, we have a policy of deleting inactive accounts, after a year. We delete approved signups that have not been “consummated,” after thirty days.

Even so, we still need to keep an eye out. A couple of days ago, an old account (not quite a year), started spewing connection requests to all the app users. It had been a legit account, so I have to assume it was pwned. We deleted it quickly.

A lot of our monitoring is done manually, and carefully. We have extremely strict privacy rules, and that actually makes security monitoring a bit more difficult.

[jacquesm]

These are excellent practices.

Such data is a liability, not an asset and if you dispose of it as soon as you reasonably can that's good. If this is a communications service consider saving a hash of the ID and refusing new sign ups with that same ID because if the data gets deleted then someone could re-sign up with someone else's old account. But if you keep a copy of the hash around you can check if an account has ever existed and refuse registration if that's the case.

[bix6]

> I provide a lot of documentation

> Some clients follow my instruction, some do not.

So you’re telling me you design a non-foolproof system?!? Why isn’t it fully automated to prevent any potential pitfalls?