BreachWARNing

Maintain job security and cybersecurity. Breach WARNing let's you know if your affiliated companies encountered data breaches, and updates you on layoffs before they come.

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Inspiration

No two questions have ever been more relevant in the software dev world than:

  • 1. Is my data secure?
  • 2. Is my job secure?

Finding the answers may seem difficult, but it does exist: The California WARN Act legally requires employers to disclose to the government when they intend to let go of their employees. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) regularly posts records of large-scale data breaches across the country.

However, both sources are typical of government websites: reliable, but out-of-date with current UI/UX standards. Our aim was to bring the data together into a modern package, to allow software devs to alleviate their concerns with the utmost ease.

What it does

Breach WARNing shows up-to-date information on data breaches and job layoffs that may affect the target user. This information is displayed in a human-friendly format and also shows an infographic on data breaches by state.

How we built it

Data scraping and wrangling was performed using Python, where we converted the original Excel files into .JSON where it could be sorted or aggregated. The website was developed using React, where data retrieval was conducted locally on-disk.

Challenges we ran into

Most of are challenges involved combing everyone's code and ensuring there was no merge conflicts. In addition, we faced CSS design issues to ensure components

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We worked together to combine our ideas in order to develop a functional, informative website that surpasses our MVP. We were able to overcome the errors we faced and learned to utilize unfamiliar technologies and combine them together for our final project.

What we learned

It was interesting to learn how easy developing a website can be with today's tools. We certainly had many obstacles to overcome in developing our product, but these obstacles were not as daunting as they may have been 5-10 years ago. Another take-away is that casting away the chase for perfection really lets creativity fly. Because of the nature of hackathons, we couldn't afford to worry about the little things that typically cause ruts in software development. We simply generated ideas and got to work on implementing them. Finally, we've learned the importance of collaboration, as every team member has uniquely contributed valuable ideas and effort to the project.

What's next for BreachWARNing

To make it in-line with how most websites operate, we would like to have the data properly hosted on a database. This will make data retrieval more straightforward, and allow for more complex uses of the data.

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