Just like other applications, your web application needs to be secure as it involves huge amounts of sensitive business data and online transactions.

Your web application should be tested to make sure that it is not vulnerable to any malicious attack and exploitation. Failing to do so can lead to serious security failures. One of such failures happened in 2013 when a breach exposed three billion Yahoo accounts. The breach caused the value of Yahoo to drop by $350 million when Verizon purchased the company.

Read on to understand how you can perform web security testing for your web application.

In this article, we explore:

• The Importance of Web App Security Testing

• Web Application Security Vulnerabilities

• The Basic Steps to Perform Web App Security Testing

• Examples of Web App Security Testing Tools

The Importance of Web App Security Testing

Web app security testing can help you identify and immediately address issues and vulnerabilities to avoid:

• Web application service downtime.

• Loss of business reputation and customers trust.

• Decrease in revenue due to online transaction problems.

• Increase in expenditures due to website clean up, backup restoration, and services reinstallation.

• Problems and penalties in complying with related legal regulations on establishing essential web app security measures.

Web Application Security Vulnerabilities

A web application vulnerability can be due to bugs, SQL injection, or viruses.

Here are some of the common vulnerabilities that you should check when performing security testing:

• Poor error handling.

• Poor URL access restrictions.

• Poor user credential management.

• Failure to perform certificate validation.

• Inappropriate session timeout or expiration control.

• Improper input filtering and sanitization.

• Poor and inefficient transport layer protection.

• Lack of function level access control.

• Remote code execution and file inclusion vulnerability.

• Security misconfigurations like poor encryption, failure to change default passwords and keys, or lack of password security policy.

The Basic Steps to Perform Web App Security Testing

Performing security testing for your web application involves several steps. These are as follows:

• Understand the requirements of your business web application. This helps you identify all the security needs and goals of your business and avoid all possible vulnerabilities of your web application based on your goals.

• Gather information about your web application architecture. Doing this helps you know the possible security flaws and risks associated with your application's type of hardware, OS, web service, or technology stack. This helps you define your security goals and identify what areas to test in your application. Understanding your web application architecture helps you mitigate security issues like:

  • Poor transport layer protection

  • Inappropriate session timeouts

  • Security misconfigurations

• Identify and list all the possible flaws, risks, and vulnerabilities of your web application. You can use automated software to scan and detect vulnerabilities of your web application like Acunetix web vulnerability scanner. With this, you can improve the security weaknesses of your web application and prevent:

  • Improper input filtering and sanitization

  • Cross-site Scripting (XSS)

  • SQL Injection

  • Remote File inclusions

• Determine the best-suited security testing tools to use. Testing tools help you perform all the security tests that are tedious to do manually. You can choose any security testing tools based on your security needs like:

  • Netsparker

  • Burp Suite

  • Acunetix web vulnerability scanner

• Create a test plan. A test plan helps you build your testing strategies and manage your resources better if you don't have a huge QA team. This ensures that deliverables are met on time. You can also prepare a traceability matrix for every identified vulnerability of your web app to make sure that they are included in the testing process. You should do this before you start to execute the testing process.

• Execute the security testing based on your test plan. Follow your plan as much as possible, but be prepared to make updates along the way as the fixes might introduce new and unexpected bugs and scenarios.

• Perform regression testing. Now that you've addressed the security issues in the previous step, it's time to test your web application's mission-critical functionalities to ensure that fixes did not break them or introduce new bugs.

• Prepare a detailed report of the testing process. This serves as a reference document for other stakeholders like executive management and development teams to be aware of every vulnerability that is found, tested, and resolved in your web application.

Examples of Web App Security Testing Tools

Security testing tools are essential when performing security testing for your web app to make sure that it is protected against malicious attacks and to proactively detect its weaknesses or vulnerabilities.

The following are some examples of security testing tools that you can use for web apps:

• Netsparker. This security platform can scan web applications to identify security flaws and vulnerabilities.

• Acunetix. This cloud-based web app security scanner can detect several types of vulnerabilities like XSS and SQL injections. It uses an innovative black-box scanning technique like DeepScan and Acusensor.

• Wapiti. This command-line web application vulnerability scanner crawls webpages and injects payloads to check if a script or form is vulnerable.

• BeEF (Browser Exploitation Framework). This penetration testing tool detects vulnerabilities of your web application using a browser. It allows testers to bypass security parameters and assess the internal environment security of the target browser.

• Burp Suite. This integrated platform is comprised of various tools that support the overall testing process from application attack analysis through exploiting and finding security weaknesses.

• W3af. This audit and attack framework can be used to identify and exploit all application vulnerabilities such as XSS and SQL Injection.

Perfect security is an unattainable ideal. But you can't be too safe, so it's always a good idea to do your best to secure your web application.

Is your business web application secure? Is your business-critical information safe and protected from any malicious access and exploitation?

Security testing protects your business information. Not sure where to start?