A Guide To Web Application Security Testing

Serena Gray
2 min readFeb 18, 2020

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Web application security testing has a lot of moving parts, but despite its intricacies, it doesn’t need to be that difficult. The trick is to understand what you want, what you require, then take a measured approach to focus your efforts on the essential applications.

So how do you go about thoroughly vetting your program environment to be sure you have no substantial security flaws on your critical applications? It’s doable for even the most complicated circumstances.

The following info lays out what, when, why, and how of most web application security testing situations, including figuring out what systems you need to test, which tools are best suited to your task, the usage of vulnerability scanners and scanner validation, and extra manual checks.

What should be examined?

The scope of your safety assessment is essential. You might have your own internal demands, or you may need to follow the elements of a business partner or client. Plus, it might be helpful if you got all of the right people on board.

It has to be clear which programs, network systems, and code that you want to check, how you’ll check them, and precisely what your particular expectations are for the deliverables. This includes requirements for testing any specific user roles.

It has to be clear which programs, network systems, and code you want to check, how you are going to test them, and what your specific expectations are for the deliverables.

Other tools are available if source code evaluation is a requirement, but be cautious; you get exactly what you pay for with source code analysis tools also, sadly, most are expensive.

Vulnerability scanning

As opposed to attempting to make a checklist of every test you will need to conduct for each and every exposure for web application security testing, then it’s a lot easier to break it down into the essential categories.

Scanner validation and additional manual checks

Much like vulnerability scanners, I can not possibly list all of the tests you need to do because there are so many prospective areas for exploitation.

The first thing you need to do is validate all your web vulnerability scanner hints to see what’s exploitable and what things in the context of your program along with your business.

Beyond what internet vulnerability scanners can perform, further areas to look at include:

This is arguably the toughest and time-consuming aspect of program security testing. The main goal should be to study your application using a malicious mindset and see what an attacker can do to the app working with an excellent conservative web browser and, as I mentioned above, an HTTP proxy.

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Serena Gray
Serena Gray

Written by Serena Gray

I work as a Senior Testing Specialist at TestingXperts. I am a testing professional accustomed to working in a complex, project-based environment.

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