10 Essential Web App Security Testing Tools For 2021

 

Organizations are using web applications for finance, marketing automation and also for internal communication. While web applications offer convenience to organizations and clients, their pervasiveness makes them a popular attack target for cybercriminals. So web app security testing, or scanning and testing web app for risk is necessary. According to the report, web apps are a popular attack target in confirmed data breaches and in some industries up to 41% data breaches are web app related. Most web app related breaches takes several months or more for security teams to discover. The longer an attacker has access to systems, the more damage they can cause.

Though the company follows best practices to protect itself against common web application attacks, this will not be enough. A web application security scanner is a software program that performs automatic black-box testing on a web application and recognizes security vulnerabilities. Scanners don’t access the source code, they just perform functional testing and try to find security vulnerabilities. There are tools which can be used for web app security. Let’s see which are those.

Web App Security Testing Tools-

1. Netsparker-

It is a dead accurate scanner that will identify vulnerabilities like SQL Injection and Cross-site Scripting in web apps and web APIs. This tool is available as both hosted as well as self-hosted solution and can be easily integrated with any type of test and dev environment. It uses automation to identify vulnerabilities and verify false positives so you don’t have to waste hours manually verifying the identified vulnerabilities once a scan is finished. It is available as a Windows software and an online service.

2. Acunetix –

It is a premium security testing tool that includes a completely automated network vulnerability scanner which detects and reports more than 50,000 known network vulnerabilities and misconfigurations. This tool discovers open ports and running services, assesses security of routers, firewalls, switches and load balancers, tests for weak passwords, DNS zone transfer, badly configured Proxy servers, weak SNMP community strings and TLS/SSL ciphers, among others.

It features innovative black box scanning and SPA crawling techniques in the form of AcuSensor and DeepScan resp. Multi-threaded, Deepscan crawler runs the uninterrupted scan of WordPress installation for more than thousand vulnerabilities. Login Sequence Recorder scans password-protected fields, and in-built vulnerability management system helps to generate various technical and compilance reports. 

3. ZED Attack Proxy (ZAP)-

ZAP is an open-source tool, especially designed to find out security vulnerabilities in the web app. It can be used as a scanner/filter of web app and able to run on Windows/Linux and Macintosh platforms. It stands as a “middle-man proxy” between a tester’s browser and web application and used to intercept and moderate the transmitted meesages. Some of the key features are- Passive scanning, automated scanner, REST-based API , Fuzzer, traditional and AJAX spiders etc.

4. SQLMap-

It is an open-source penetration testing tool which is used for detecting and exploiting SQL injection issues in apps. This tool comes with a command line interface. It has support of well known platforms like Linux, Apple Mac OS X, microsoft windows. All the available versions are free to download.

5. Vega-

Vega is a free open-source web vulnerability scanner and testing platform written in java and offers a GUI based environment. This tool can be used to find SQL injection, header injection, directory listing, shell injection, cross-site scripting, file inclusion and so on. It can also be extended using a powerful API written in Javascript. One can use Vega Scanner, Vega Proxy and Proxy Scanner and scan with credentials. 

6. Grabber-

It is a simple and portable web app scanner which is used to detect many security vulnerabilities in web applications. This tool is developed in Python and an executable version is also available if you need it. Grabber scans and tells where the vulnerability exists. It detects the vulnerabilities like- ajax testing , cross-site scripting, sql injection, file inclusion, JS source code analyzer, Backup file check etc.

7. BeEF-

BeFF stands for browser Exploitation Framework. It is a penetration testing tool helpful in detecting an application’s weakness using browser vulnerabilities. It uses client-side attack vectors to verify security of application and issue browser commands like redirection, generating dialogue boxes, changing URLs, and so on. BeEF expands its scan circumference beyond the usual network perimeter and client system to analyze where the security system of a web browser stands. 

8. Probely-

It scans your web application to detect vulnerabilities or security issues and also provides guidance to fix them. It includes a smooth, intuitive interface and follows API-First development approach that provides all features through an API. This allows the tool to be integrated into Continuous Integration pipelines so as to automate security testing. Probably can also be used to check specific PCI-DSS, ISO27001, HIPAA and GDPR requirements. 

9. w3af-

W3af is a web application audit and attack framework effective against 200+ vulnerabilities. Detecting vulnerabilities like SQL Injection, Guessable credentials, Cross-site scripting, unhandled application errors and PHP misconfigurations, helps to limit the total exposure of a website to malicious elements. Using graphical and console-based interface, this tool promises the audit of web app’s security within five clicks. It is also used to send HTTP request and cluster HTTP responses. If a website is secured, it can use authentication modules to scan them. Output can be logged into a console, a file or sent by email.

10. Skipfish-

Skipfish is a web app security tool that crawls the website and then checks every page for various security threats. It was written in C and is highly optimized for HTTP handling and using minimum CPU. It can easily handle 2000 requests per second without any load on the CPU. This tool uses a heuristics approach while crawling and testing web pages and claims to offer high quality and some false positives. It is available for MacOS X, Windows, FreeBSD, and Linux.

Wrap-up-

These are some of the best open-source web application security testing tools. If you are struggling to secure your web app, you can go with the best one among those tools. You can also consult with solace experts to help you through the consultation and development. You can hire php developers for an secured web apps development. Connect with Solace and get a free quote for secured web apps development that drives your business to the next level.

10 Best Practices For Web Application Security

 

Computers to small IoT devices, anything that has access to the internet can be hacked and hackers can get sensitive data about millions of people. Government, retail, healthcare are the most popular sectors among hackers. If your web application or website is in another domain, it doesn’t mean that you can relax. Losses regarding security of users personal data can cause breaking of trust and it leads to more financial and reputational losses. Although there is no 100% guarantee of security, as unforeseen circumstances can happen. There are some methods that you can implement to reduce web app security issues. Let’s see those security best practices.

You can also- Effective Considerations to choose the technology for Web Application.

Web Application Security Best Practices-

Web Application Security Best Practices

1. Use SSL (HTTPS) Encryption-

Use of SSL encryption is necessary and priority in web app protection. HTTPS can protect vulnerable and exploitable data like social security numbers, credit and debit card numbers, login information, for team members and users also. With HTTPS, data that is placed into a web application is encrypted so that it’s basically a useless task for hackers to try and get the data. Also, browsers like Chrome flags websites/apps as insecure that are lacking a secure HTTPS certificate. HTTPS secures private data, plain and simple.

2. Document All Changes Of Software-

When your web app goes live, the number of new features and changes grows. While paying attention to new changes requesting from users and trying to bring them in reality, developers and owners put off documenting changes and risk their web security. From the security perspective, it is a big mistake and can cost a lot. As projects evolve, there is addition of new frameworks, libraries and features. Any single issue in a third-party library can cause major data infringement and without documentation, it will be hard to find where the problem occurred. So always document all the changes in software.

3. Perform An Inventory Of Web Applications-

Maybe you don’t have an idea about – your company relies on which applications on a daily basis. Most of the organizations have many rogue apps running at any given time and never notice it until something goes wrong. One cannot maintain effective web app security without knowing which apps company is using. Performing inventory can be a big task and it will take some time to complete.  When you perform inventory, note the purpose of each application. Take your time and get every application

4. Prioritize Web Applications-

Next step after completing the inventory of existing web app is to sort them according to the priority. Sort the applications in 3 main categories- Critical, Serious, Normal. 

Critical apps are those that are externally facing and contain user information.  Such applications should be managed first because most of the time these are targeted and exploited by hackers. Serious applications contains sensitive information and these may be internal or external. Normal applications  have less exposure but they should be included in tests. With such categorization, you can reserve extensive testing for critical apps and reserve less intensive testing for less critical ones. This allows you to use the company’s most effective resources and achieve progress quickly. 

5. Use Web Application Firewall-

Web application firewall is a filter for HTTP traffic between a server and client. It restricts malicious requests and infiltrate your databases. Use of Firewalls is one of the popular way to protect software because it analyze incoming traffic and restricts the suspicious activities. WAF don’t need developers to change anything in the source code which makes them convenient to use. But traditional firewalls has some disadvantages: they are unable to detect some types of attacks. For high level security, you can use advanced WAFs that can protect your application from SQL injection attacks and cross-site scripting.

6. Prioritize Vulnerabilities-

While working with web apps, it is good to decide which vulnerabilities are worth eliminating and which are not excessively troubling. In fact most of the web applications have many vulnerabilities. Taking out all vulnerabilities from all web applications just is not possible or even worth your time. After completing categorization of application with respect to importance, it will consume more time to test all. By restricting yourself to testing for just the threatening vulnerabilities, you will save a huge time and will complete the work rapidly. Determination of vulnerabilities to focus on is depends on the apps that you’re using. You must know some security measures that should be implemented. Always remember that as testing unfolds, you may came to know that you have ignored some issues. 

Try not to hesitate to postponed testing to regroup and focus on extra vulnerabilities. At last, remember that in future, this work will be a lot simpler, as you are starting from scratch now and won’t be later.

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