Scott Finlay

Staff Engineer

Scott is a software developer from the United States currently living in Germany. He studied computer science at the University of Minnesota with an emphasis in security. He enjoys writing code, writing technical articles, learning new things, and solving problems.

Scott has worked at Sixt since 2016, working in a variety of teams covering topics such as CRM, digital checkout, reservations, third party integrations, and the Security Guild.

Posts by Scott Finlay:

• Golang's Atomic

  Nov 23, 2021 • Scott Finlay • Engineering

  Golang is a language which excels at parallelism, with spinning up new goroutines being as easy as typing “go”. As you find yourself building more and more complex systems, it becomes exceedingly important to properly protect access to shared resources in order to prevent race conditions. Such resources might include configuration which can be updated on-the-fly (e.g. feature flags), internal states (e.g. circuit breaker state), and more.

  read more

• Public Service Announcement on Slack Webhook Security

  Nov 12, 2021 • Scott Finlay • Security

  While experimenting with different tools for detecting hard-coded credentials, we noticed that some (like GitHub Advanced Security) point out Slack webhooks if they appear in code. At first, we mostly ignored those since they seemed like fairly low risk if any at all. Then, just for fun, we added the pattern to our own home-grown scanner

  read more

• The Bot Saga

  Nov 10, 2021 • Scott Finlay • Security

  There comes a time in the lifespan of all large websites when bot traffic becomes an issue on some scale or another. Sometimes you get bombarded with scrapers and your servers can’t handle the load. Sometimes malicous users attempt to brute force security-related endpoints. Sometimes bots drop spam content into input fields. Regardless of the usecase, eventually the problem grows enough that it needs to be addressed somehow.

  This happened to us, and here’s the long road we traveled.

  read more