Ask HN: Most difficult programming challenge you solved in 2014?
4 comments
Of everything done, doing nothing about something "so that I can be home at night" still places highest in my list of challenges with software engineering.
Correlate real time online banking traffic (5,000,000 hits a day) with multiple threat intelligence feeds fraud data to deliver real time security alerts within 10 seconds of suspicious online activity.
What's the next step after a security alert is delivered (i.e. does it go to a person first? does it get written down somewhere? are these bells constantly ringing?)? I promise I'm not a bad guy :)
The special care is taken to avoid alert blindness (i.e. too many similar alerts inevitably cause ignorance syndrome).
I made a human study to make sure the timing of alert is enough to keep centinel's attention sharp, yet no important information event is missed.
The big picture - the action is taken to protect possibly compromised client's bank account.
The big picture - the action is taken to protect possibly compromised client's bank account.
The most difficult project I have solved (just finishing up the implementation) is developing a monitoring solution for a bunch of legacy telephone PBX's.
Essentially, the bureaucratic overhead for getting a bunch of companies to open their firewalls to us was unfeasible. Long story short, I ended up hijacking the SSL/VPN generated by a running JVM to forward a bunch of SNMP/OSSI-polling traffic to our api.
At the end, after implementing the above, I found out about a service port for outgoing only traffic offered to business partners. That was much easier to use, only requiring nginx to split off a certain sub-path of SSL traffic + business partner status.
I am still proud of the original hack, although brittle and ugly it was very exciting to get working.
Essentially, the bureaucratic overhead for getting a bunch of companies to open their firewalls to us was unfeasible. Long story short, I ended up hijacking the SSL/VPN generated by a running JVM to forward a bunch of SNMP/OSSI-polling traffic to our api.
At the end, after implementing the above, I found out about a service port for outgoing only traffic offered to business partners. That was much easier to use, only requiring nginx to split off a certain sub-path of SSL traffic + business partner status.
I am still proud of the original hack, although brittle and ugly it was very exciting to get working.
I wrote a automation script which keep track of server process and recover them on failure
Thanks