System and method for automated generation of web decoding templates

Apparatus, comprising:

• a network interface configured to receive sample network packets exchanged with a web server that correspond with a target transaction type, wherein the packets are exchanged using a transfer protocol, and wherein the packets comprise data of a target communication protocol with an unknown structure,
• wherein the network interface is further configured to receive subsequent network packets exchanged between one or more user computers and the web server, the subsequent network packets are encoded with the target communication protocol;
• a non-transitory memory, which is configured to store the sample network traffic;
• and
• a processor computer programmed in software, which, when the software is executed on the processor computer, is configured to:
• present, via a graphical user interface, one or more of the packets on a display of an operator terminal,
• receive one or more inputs from the operator terminal to formulate one or more recognition rules for recognizing target fields in the data of the target communication protocol and one or more extraction rules for extracting target information from the recognized target fields,
• generate a structured template for parsing the target transaction type of the target communication protocol based on the one or more recognition rules and the one or more extraction rules, and
• decode the subsequent network packets using the one or more recognition rules and the one or more extraction rules of the structured template to extract the target information from the subsequent network packets.