Being at the bottom of the very tall mountain of knowledge in the cybersecurity space is daunting, but one of the upsides is that nearly every peek behind the curtain reveals some new and interesting tidbit about how the machine — and its attackers — works. Just this evening I was taking a look at the weblog for my netBSD-hosted website fredvector.com. The format of the nginx log contains both access events and errors, in different syntax, so it’s visually garbled (at least compared to the only other log format I am familiar with, the Ubuntu auth.log). So, I asked Claude for some assistance with some basic regex to start to make some sense of it, and quickly ended up learning about a vulnerability scanner probing my website for exposed configuration files.
awk '/error/' /var/log/fredvector.com | tail -20This revealed all manner of bogus connection attempts, including requests for Wordpress files. But one in particular caught my attention:
2026/02/03 14:24:51 [error] 10143#0: *664544 open() "/.../fredvector.com/.env" failed (2: No such file or directory),
client: 204.76.203.25, server: fredvector.com,
request: "GET /.env HTTP/1.1", host: "fredvector.com"An “.env” file? What is that?
An .env file is where many web applications store passwords, API keys, and other secrets. It’s created intentionally by developers, but the danger comes when it’s accidentally exposed during deployment through server misconfiguration.
With a bit more regex, I saw that this same IP address had made this scan several times over the last month:
awk '/\.env/ && /204\.76\.203\.25/' /.../fredvector.comThis showed attempts on the 18th, 23rd, and 29th of January, and again on the 3rd of February. So this vulnerability-scanning bot (presumably it’s a bot) appears to be sweeping my site every five or six days, checking for this small trove of credentials.
Since I don’t have one, no problem — for me. For now.