The security threat is real, in the recent years we have seen many renowned web application and websites got compromised, some of them are belongs to the large organizations. Think about an ecommerce website, as a buyer, you must be curious how they are using your information; can they protect your personal information and credit card information? The business owner has the same question in the mind to protect against the hacking attack and to fix the vulnerabilities like SQL-injection vulnerability.
Here comes the role of an information security professional and the tools that he/she utilize to perform the test your web application. Cross-site-scripting and SQL-injection seems the most dangerous vulnerabilities, along with the remote code execution RFI, LFI and others. You must have read that the kid has exploited the SQL-injection to hack into TALK TALK website. So just imagine, how important the automated tool is, even a kid with the tool can hack the known web infrastructure. Well, the point is not to encourage the usage of automated vulnerability scanning tools to hack, but the point is to encourage the usage of automated tools to find the vulnerability and fix it before the kid is exploit.
Table of Contents
Web Application Vulnerability Assessment Approaches:
Primarily, there are two ways or approaches to conduct a web application vulnerability assessment test:
• Manual, check list based web application security assessment
• Automated: Tools that perform the vulnerability test
The world is moving towards automation, we want everything to get done automatically, then why not the web application security test? Both the aforementioned approaches have their own pros and cons, but the development of the smart automated vulnerability assessment tools pushed the manual approach backward.
The manual approach is not feasible anymore, because it takes time. On the other hand, automated tools can scan and review the entire web application effectively and efficiently.
In the coming lines, we will describe different benefits of automated testing tools:
Time & Cost effective:
Accuracy Matters:
Automated Tools are helpful for the Developers:
The automated testing tools also help the developers and other team players morally as they have thoughts after testing that almost the whole application has been tested properly and there may not be the major loop holes in the application.
After providing you the best possible information of the topic, we can conclude that the web application auto scanner are very useful for the web applications and now become the tools of time saving and effectiveness.