In the past, many popular websites have been hacked. Hackers are active and always trying to hack websites and leak data. This is why security testing of web applications is very important. And this is where web application security scanners come into play.
Wapiti – Web Application Scanner Black-box testing
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A web application security scanner is a software program which performs automatic black-box testing on a web application and identifies security vulnerabilities. Scanners do not access the source code; they only perform functional testing and try to find security vulnerabilities. Various paid and free web application vulnerability scanners are available.
Grabber is a web application scanner which can detect many security vulnerabilities in web applications. It performs scans and tells where the vulnerability exists. It can detect the following vulnerabilities:
It is not fast as compared to other security scanners, but it is simple and portable. This should be used only to test small web applications because it takes too much time to scan large applications.
Vega is another free open-source web vulnerability scanner and testing platform. With this tool, you can perform security testing of a web application. This tool is written in Java and offers a GUI-based environment. It is available for OS X, Linux and Windows.
I personally like this tool. It can be used to find a wide range of vulnerabilities in web applications. The tool is very simple and easy to use. Even if you are new to penetration testing, you can easily use this tool to start learning penetration testing of web applications.
Wapiti is a web vulnerability scanner which lets you audit the security of your web applications. It performs black-box testing by scanning web pages and injecting data. It tries to inject payloads and see if a script is vulnerable. It supports both GET and POSTHTTP attacks and detects multiple vulnerabilities.
W3af is a popular web application attack and audit framework. This framework aims to provide a better web application penetration testing platform. It was developed using Python. By using this tool, you will be able to identify more than 200 kinds of web application vulnerabilities including SQL injection, cross-site scripting and many others.
Wfuzz is another freely available open-source tool for web application penetration testing. It can be used to brute-force GET and POST parameters for testing against various kinds of injections like SQL, XSS, LDAP and many others. It also supports cookie fuzzing, multi-threading, SOCK, proxy, authentication, parameter brute-forcing, multiple proxy and many other things.
Grendel-Scan is another nice open-source web application security tool. This is an automatic tool for finding security vulnerabilities in web applications. Many features are also available for manual penetration testing. This tool is available for Windows, Linux and Macintosh and was developed in Java.
Arachni is an open-source tool developed for providing a penetration testing environment. This tool can detect various web application security vulnerabilities. It can detect various vulnerabilities like SQL injection, XSS, local file inclusion, remote file inclusion, unvalidated redirect and many others.
These are the best open-source web application security testing tools. I tried my best to list all the tools available online. If a tool was not updated for many years, I did not mention it here; this is because if a tool is more than 10 years old, it can create compatibility issues in the recent environment.
Besides identifying the aforesaid vulnerabilities, Wapiti also performs some addition penetration testing tasks, such as finding potentially dangerous files on servers, finding configuration errors in .httaccess files that can lead to security breach, and finding backup copies of the applications on the server that could compromise the security of said web applications if an attacker manages to get a hand on those files. The results gathered are automatically stored in a html file. The other supported file formats include .XML, .JSON, and .TXT.
The primary function of security testing is to perform functional testing of a web application under observance and find as many security issues as possible that could potentially lead to hacking. All of this is done without the need to access the source code.
Security testing helps in figuring out various loopholes and flaws of a web application in the initial stage. Furthermore, it also helps in testing whether an application has successfully encoded security code or not. Primary areas covered by security testing are:
Developed by OWASP (Open Web Application Security Project), ZAP or Zed Attack Proxy is a multi-platform, open-source web application security testing tool. ZAP is used for finding a number of security vulnerabilities in a web app during the development as well as the testing phase. Thanks to its intuitive GUI, Zed Attach Proxy can be used with equal ease by newbies as that by experts. The security testing tool supports command-line access for advanced users. In addition to being one of the most famous OWASP projects, it is awarded the flagship status. ZAP is written in Java. Other than its use as a scanner, ZAP can also be used to intercept a proxy for manually testing a webpage. ZAP exposes:
Developed in Python, Wfuzz is popularly used for brute-forcing web applications. The open-source security testing tool has no GUI interface and is usable only via command line. Vulnerabilities exposed by Wfuzz are:
One of the most popular web application security testing frameworks that are also developed using Python is W3af. The tool allows testers to find over 200 types of security issues in web applications, including:
Another opportune open source security testing tool is SonarQube. In addition to exposing vulnerabilities, it is used to measure the source code quality of a web application. Despite being written in Java, SonarQube is able to carry out analysis of over 20 programming languages. Furthermore, it gets easily integrated with continuous integration tools to the likes of Jenkins. Issues found by SonarQube are highlighted in either green or red light. While the former represent low-risk vulnerabilities and issues, the latter corresponds to severe ones. For advanced users, access via command prompt is available. An interactive GUI is in place for those relatively new to testing. Some of the vulnerabilities exposed by SonarQube include:
A network traffic security testing tool from Google, Nogotofail is a lightweight application that is able to detect TLS/SSL vulnerabilities and misconfigurations. Vulnerabilities exposed by Nogotofail are:
The portable Grabber is designed to scan small web applications, including forums and personal websites. The lightweight security testing tool has no GUI interface and is written in Python. Vulnerabilities uncovered by Grabber includes:
Apt for both penetration testers and admins, Arachni is designed to identify security issues within a web application. The open-source security testing tool is capable of uncovering a number of vulnerabilities, including:
This sums up the list of top 10 open source testing tools for web applications. Which is your favourite application security testing tool? Tell us in the comments. All the best for your Ethical Hacking journey!
W3af is a popular web application security testing framework. Developed using Python, it offers an efficient web application penetration testing platform. This tool can be used to detect more than 200 types of security issues in web applications, including SQL injection and Cross-Site Scripting. It checks for following vulnerabilities in the web-apps:
Skipfish is a web application security testing tool that crawls the website recursively and checks each page for possible vulnerability and prepares the audit report in the end. Written in C language, Skipfish is optimized for HTTP handling and leaving minimum CPU footprints. The software claims to handle 2K requests per second, without displaying CPU footprints. Also, the tool claims to provide high-quality positives as it uses a heuristics approach during crawling and testing web apps.
Ratproxy is another open source web application security testing tool which can be used to find any lapse in web applications, thereby making the app secure from any possible hacking attack. This semi-automatic testing software is supported by Linux, FreeBSD, MacOS X, and Windows (Cygwin) systems.
SQLMap is a popular open source web application security testing tool that automates the process of detecting and utilizing SQL injection vulnerability in a database of the website. Packed with a variety of features, it has a powerful testing engine that enables the test to penetrate effortlessly and perform SQL injection check on a web application.
Wfuzz is another open-source tool for a web application security testing tool that is freely available on the market. Developed in Python, this testing tool is used for brute-forcing web applications. Some of the features of Wfuzz are:
Grendel-Scan is a useful open source web application security tool, designed for finding security lapse in the web apps. Available for Windows, Linux, and Macintosh, the tool is developed in Java. It comes with an automated testing module which is used for detecting vulnerabilities in web applications. Besides, the software also includes many features, especially for manual penetration testing.
Arachni is an open-source web application security testing tool designed to help penetration testers and administrators assess the security of web applications. This tool is developed to identify security lapse in web applications and make it hacker proof. Arachni can detect:
Understanding and preventing website vulnerabilities is especially important for any business or corporate institution that maintains or plans to maintain a website or web application. A website vulnerability scanner is designed to look for these security flaws in a website. It searches for flaws in web services and web servers. Because cybercriminals are quick to exploit these vulnerabilities, you should be implementing regular use of a web scanner as well. Routine web vulnerability testing will allow you to patch security flaws before cyber attackers can manipulate them. These scanners simply examine the application's code for web flaws like SQL injections, cross-site scripting (XSS), and path traversal. 2ff7e9595c
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