The End of Life for Netsparker Community Edition

Read this blog post for more information on why we are stopping the development of Netsparker Community Edition, the free SQL Injection scanner.

When we started Netsparker we released Netsparker Community Edition, a free SQL Injection scanner. I am sure many of you are familiar with it as till this day it is generating thousands of downloads each month.

There were several reasons why back then we released Netsparker Community Edition, but mainly as the name implies it was to help the community and to help us grow and learn about the industry.

Helping the Community

Till this day many businesses and organizations are not yet aware of the need to secure their websites and web applications, or of the impact a hacked website can have on their business and its reputation. And since Netsparker CE was a free SQL Injection scanner many downloaded it and started using it, thus helping thousands of businesses identify SQL Injection vulnerabilities in their websites and fix them.

Learning About the Industry

Even though most of our management team have years of experience in the security and software industry, like every other startup we still needed to learn as much as possible about the industry of automated web vulnerability scanning. And Netsparker Community Edition helped us learn a lot. In fact we are really grateful to anyone who used it and sent us feedback.

Time to Move On

As a company our aim was always to develop a product that any business or organization can use to ensure the security of their websites, irrelevant if they have a dedicated security team or not, or if the users are seasoned security professionals or not. And till this day we are happy to say that we achieved all of this. As a matter of fact even though Netsparker is just six years old, and is the youngest company in this industry we are already rated as one of the top players in the industry.

A few months back we launched the only false positive free online web application security scanner, Netsparker Enterprise. It is our enterprise online service offering and like any other new product, there is a lot of hard work that needs to be done. So to ensure the quality our products Netsparker Desktop and Netsparker Enterprise we decided to terminate Netsparker Community Edition and focus all the resources on them.

Thank You

So far the Netsparker adventure has been a great ride and without Netsparker Community Edition it would have been different, and maybe not as successful as this one. Thanks to the feedback we were able to get we've built the best automated web scanning engines available on the market and want to continue building on the existing success. We are also very happy that Netsparker helped many businesses get started with web application security and hopefully create a safer and more secure internet.

I'd like to personally thank every one of you who gave us feedback and was involved in this adventure, and encourage every Netsparker Community Edition user to switch to Netsparker Desktop or Netsparker Enterprise. After all, web application security is not just about SQL Injections. Feel free to get in touch with us with any queries you might have and happy scans!

About the Author

Ferruh Mavituna - Founder, Strategic Advisor

Ferruh Mavituna is the founder and CEO of Invicti Security, a world leader in web application vulnerability scanning. His professional obsessions lie in web application security research, automated vulnerability detection, and exploitation features. He has authored several web security research papers and tools and delivers animated appearances at cybersecurity conferences and on podcasts. Exuberant at the possibilities open to organizations by the deployment of automation, Ferruh is keen to demonstrate what can be achieved in combination with Invicti’s award-winning products, Netsparker and Acunetix.