Heap / Priority Queuehard70 minSecurity Engineer

Attack Real-Time Top-K Prioritizer

Security Engineer signal: heap + top-k in a attack path analysis context. This is a ProdMatch-owned security engineer drill, framed as a April 2026 Practo Cloud Security simulation, not a copied platform question.

Company context

Practo · Cloud Security

Freshness

April 2026

Product surface

attack path analysis

ProdMatch interview simulation based on product-team patterns; not a claim of a real company question.

Question

Your Cloud Security team needs a live top-k view for assets. Each update changes an item's score. Return the current top k item IDs after each update, ordered by score desc then ID asc.

Input

Initial scores, k, and update stream [id, delta].

Output

Top-k IDs after every update.

Constraints

1 <= items <= 200000
1 <= updates <= 200000
Scores can be negative.

Concepts

attack graphs
policy tries
anomaly detection
heap
top-k
streaming rank

scores: [5,1,3], k=2, update [1,+5] -> [1,0]

Approach

Try framing your own approach first. The 30 seconds you think before peeking is where learning happens.

Clean Solution

Reveal the approach first.

How well did you understand?

Your rating tunes when this problem shows up again.

Common Mistakes

Use a stable tie-breaker for equal scores.
Do not sort the full stream when k is small.

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