Above is a demo video of our realtime NGINX log visualizer, created in the style of Defend your Castle. When connected to an NGINX
log, the app dispays incoming requests as they approach the corresponding server.
This app development started when we noticed a stream of requests from Open AI bots crawling our website. We felt
the need
to fight back, and generally understand the invisible landscape of the internet around us. There is a whole bustling
world of crawlers, bots, and attackers operating on the internet that somehow our modern way of browsing leaves us
completely obvlivious to!
We aimed to use the spatial dimension to comprehend the log in a new way. Requests from the same IP
appear from the same spatial location, IPs are parsed to country flags, device names are simplified, and avatar type signals the intent of the request.
For example, most ethical crawlers and bots will let their identity be known in the sender URL. Possible malicious
agents can be identified when you see requests going to urls such as .env, .git, or /admin.
Future developments
include the ability to adjust your NGINX config directly through the web app, providing a real-time defence
strategy:)
This app is made with Golang and ThreeJS frontend, compiled to a single binary for ease of use. If you would like to
try it out on your own NGINX server log, you can download the latest release on Github.