Although there are many moving components in web application security testing, it doesn’t necessarily have to be challenging. Knowing what you need and want and taking a deliberate approach to concentrating your efforts on the most crucial applications is the trick.

How then do you thoroughly inspect your application environment to ensure that none of your crucial applications include significant security flaws? Even in the most complicated circumstances, it is possible.

The following material outlines a very specific website testing checklist including the what, when, why, and how of the majority of web application security testing scenarios, including selecting the tools that are most appropriate for the job, using vulnerability scanners and scanner validation, and other related information.

1.    What demands testing?

The extent of your security evaluation is crucial. You might need to adhere to the needs of a client or business partner in addition to your own internal standards. And you need to recruit the appropriate individuals.

It must be obvious which programmes, networks, and pieces of code you need to test, how you plan to test them, and what results you specifically expect from the deliverables. This comprises the conditions needed to test any particular user roles. I usually advise testing as a regular user, as an untrusted outsider, and as a user with all the application’s conceivable privileges.

2.    What equipment is ideal for the job?

A web vulnerability scanner, like Netsparker or Acunetix Web Vulnerability Scanner, is a bare minimum requirement for web application security testing. Use an HTTP proxy, such as Burp Suite, for authenticated testing so you may try to tamper with user logins, session management, application processes, and other things.

Other tools are available if source code analysis is necessary, but use caution—most source code analysis tools are expensive, and you get what you pay for with them. I’m not sure if the benefits of source code analysis are worth the cost and time. Nevertheless, it might be necessary, in which case it would have to be completed.

3.    Searching for vulnerabilities

It is simpler to divide it down into the key categories when performing security web application testing rather than attempting to make a checklist of every test you must perform for every vulnerability. Make sure your scanners are testing for the major issues, such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting, and file inclusion, when you run vulnerability scans. It’s frequently a good idea to run the scanner using an OWASP Top 10 or comparable policy. Depending on your application platform and the particular needs, you can find that you need to develop a unique policy.

Although Layer 7 is primarily the focus of vulnerability assessment, source code, cloud configurations, and network hosts may also need to be examined. Your automated tests should, at the very least, search for SSL/TLS configuration errors as well as web and application server security flaws.

The majority of issues should be discovered by dedicated web vulnerability scanners, but I’ve seen that you frequently require traditional network vulnerability scanners like Nessus or Qualys to locate everything at this level. Using a tool like Nessus or a specialised tool like Cloud Conformity, for example, can help find further cloud security configuration errors in AWS environments.

4.    Validation of the scanner and further manual checks

I can’t reasonably describe all the checks you should carry out because there are so many potential places for exploitation, much like with vulnerability scanners. Verify all of your online vulnerability scanner’s findings first to determine what can be exploited and what is important in the context of your application and business.

In addition to what online vulnerability scanners can accomplish, other things to consider are:

Password policy exploitation, including complexity enforcement and intruder lockout capabilities; login mechanism and session manipulations involving passwords, cookies, and tokens; user- or web browser-specific functionality and flaws; application logic weaknesses that allow for manual manipulation of the business workflow and specific input fields.

5.    Publish your findings and share them with the appropriate parties

Unfortunately, step four is often where application security testing ends. Codifying your findings into a formal security assessment report is one of the most underappreciated components of a formal application testing methodology.

This not only leaves a paper trail and shows that due diligence was taken, but it is also useful for other stakeholders to refer to, including the development teams, DevSecOps personnel, and executive management. Maintaining secrecy and keeping others in the dark is one of the quickest ways to lose support for application security measures and to be penetrated.

 

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