It can be interpreted as you suggest, but does not necessarily come from the person in charge. It might mean that auditors forced the installation of a WAF beca

It can be interpreted as you suggest, but does not necessarily come from the person in charge. It might mean that auditors forced the installation of a WAF because of $REGULATIONS (irrespective of the actual code quality) and refused to allow weakening the rules for password fields. EDIT: as they don't actually check for all the banned strings, the "auditor + mandatory misconfigured WAF" hypothesis expressed above is not valid in this case. But let it stay as an otherwise-plausible explanation, or maybe something that was valid in the past.