Creepy, Crawly Bots

Over my modest amount of time spent tinkering with web design, I've noticed an alarming amount of web requests hit my servers. The first time I noticed it, it made me feel contaminated. I felt unease and apprehension. I thought a hacker was trying to gain access to my server! But nothing ever happened.

Later, a second request come in - This time from a different IP address. Tentatively, I looked up the IP's geolocation. Well, I don't know what I expected to see, but it turned out to be a typical ISP in an ordinary, nondescript city.

Huh. How about that.

I had heard that bots are constantly scanning the internet - The emphasis always being that they are looking for open ports and vulnerabilities to take advantage of. And yeah, there definitely are those. But it turns out there are so many more bots! The more I saw, the more I wondered, "What the heck are all these requests? And why?"

Well, I don't have the answer for every request. But I decided to start logging them in a database so I can display them in a nice, visible list.

So that's what this site is. It basically only exists to see what requests it receives, and it stores these requests in a table for everyone to see! Head on over to the 'Requests Log' page to take a look. The log shows the IP, the ISP it belongs to, the city, the country, the method (what kind of request), the agent (what type of device or software made the request), and the timestamp. Thanks to IP-API.com ^↗ for the geolocation info.

Oh. And I also made an API where you can query/create/manipulate the data because I wanted to learn how that worked. Do whatever you want with it, I don't care. There will always be more bot requests.