Security Vulnerability Check and Web Traffic Forecasting

Our tool enables you to easily assess the safety of a website and forecast its traffic

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** Inspiration**

The need to reduce exposure to viruses or vulnerabilities cannot be overemphasized in today's digital world. In addition, it has become increasingly important to forecast web traffic for a number of reasons such as:

  1. Planning server capacity

  2. Forecasting future revenues: for instance, Amazon has different sites for different parts of the world, hence, access to future web traffic forecasts will help them appraise their future revenues

  3. Website valuation: based on conversion rates, traffic, session information, and traffic or page views, an interested investor or buyer can make an informed valuation of a site

What it does

The application automatically generates a security report for a domain entered by a user or client. It can produce security report for any domain provided it is active and valid. In addition, it will generate a report of the web traffic data and as well as the plots for a 3-year forecast. For now, we have limited this part (web traffic report and forecast) to only BBC News since we were only able to access the extensive web traffic information of bbc.com.

How we built it

The data for the application were retrieved using the Virus Total API and similarweb API

Challenges we ran into

It was difficult to retrieve web traffic data with similarweb due to the recurrent internal server errors. The API specification provided on the AWS Data Exchange Marketplace was unusable on postman without some tweaks. We had to manually disable API key requirement, among others

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Being able to retrieve traffic data using the similarweb API after so many trials and producing the html report

What we learned

Making API calls with postman, python, boto3, and use of Facebook Prophet for time series forecasting

What's next for Security Vulnerability Check and Web Traffic Forecasting

With access to more data, we would create a more robust application that can produce reports for an extensive number of sites from business to entertainment. Next, deployment and CI/CD.

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