Firewall rules usually begin with a business need: a new application, vendor connection, migration, troubleshooting session, or urgent incident response. At that point, the rule may be justified and time-sensitive.
The risk appears later when the original reason disappears but the access remains. The application is decommissioned, the project ends, the vendor changes, or the temporary exception becomes a permanent part of the rulebase because nobody owns its removal.
Treating rules as lifecycle-managed assets helps reduce that risk. Ownership, comments, expiry dates, regular review, and automated audit findings all make it easier to spot rules that no longer deserve to exist.