Finding Vulnerabilities with a Website Security Scanner

Web applications are vital business tools. Enterprises and organizations use them to provide services and share information with customers, business partners and investors. Businesses are so dependent on them that it is common to have entire teams dedicated to developing and maintaining web applications.

Though web applications have to be available on the internet 247, making them prone to malicious hacker attacks. Web applications are very complex and have a big attack surface, therefore more often than not they also have vulnerabilities hackers can exploit. Hence why you need the automation of the Netsparker web application security scanner.

Netsparker empowers businesses to continuously develop their web applications, add new features and include security vulnerability assessments and testing – without hindering the development and QA processes.

Why Do You Need an Automated Website Security Scanner?

Most websites are designed in an Agile development environment. This means that they are updated multiple times a day. Since most developers are non security-savvy, and manual code reviews and web penetration tests take too long, businesses need to incorporate an automated security tool such as the Netsparker website security scanner into their SDLC and devOps environments.

By automating and integrating the vulnerability assessments and security scanning processes in your development processes, you can identify vulnerabilities such as SQL Injection and Cross-site Scripting (XSS) at an earlier stage. The earlier you identify security vulnerabilities the easier and less costly it is to fix them.

Save Time and Resources With a Website Security Scanner

The beauty of an automated web vulnerability scanner such as Netsparker is that you do not have to be a seasoned security professional or a white hat hacker to use it. Also, it is not necessary to distract developers from their key roles to do security scanning.

Netsparker is very easy to use. It employs its unique Proof-Based Scanning™ technology to verify that the detected security vulnerabilities are real and not false positives. Therefore, the vulnerability assessment process can be delegated to less qualified professionals because there is no need for anyone to spend weeks manual verifying the findings of the automated website security check.

Detect Security Vulnerabilities & Zero-day Issues in All Web Applications

The Netsparker vulnerability scanner employs a Chrome-based crawling engine. The engine can crawl and identify attack surfaces in any type of web application, web service and web API available through HTTP or HTTPS. When you security scan your web applications with the Netsparker web application security testing tool, you check if it is vulnerable to thousands of different web application vulnerability variants, such as:

• SQL injection
• Cross-site Scripting (XSS)
• Local File Inclusion
• Remote Code Evaluation (Execution)
• Command Injection

Netsparker’s advanced scanning technology can also detect critical vulnerabilities and zero-day vulnerabilities in any type of web application. To date, it has detected hundreds of zero-day security vulnerabilities in off-the-shelf applications such as WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal.

Automate the Vulnerability Assessment Process With a Website Security Scanner for More Secure Web Applications

A website security scanner will never replace a penetration tester; and a penetration tester cannot do what a website security scanner does – analyze thousands of responses within minutes without doing any mistakes. Though they compliment each other. While the occasional penetration test is a must, continuous automated website security testing and scans for web application vulnerabilities are also a must for a more robust web application security programme.

Netsparker is more than an automated website security scanner. It also has built-in workflow and reporting tools, and can be easily integrated with issue tracking systems and in SDLC, DevOps and CI/CD environments.

With the Netsparker web application security solution you will be able to:

• Automatically identify web vulnerabilities in your web applications, web services and web APIs, even those which use JavaScript and other client-site technology
• Identify misconfigurations in web servers and server-side technologies such as PHP and .NET that might lead to security issues
• Discover web application and server configuration issues such as SSL vulnerabilities or information disclosure issues
• Identify vulnerabilities in off-the-shelf Java libraries and frameworks
• Scan WordPress for vulnerabilities (and other open source applications such as Joomla!)
• Improve the triaging of security vulnerabilities and issues
• Automatically scan vulnerability fixes before they reach the live environment
• Gain a comprehensive overview of the security state of all your web applications via a series of managerial and compliance reports for PCI DSS, OWASP Top 10 and others.

Do not take risks! While you must find and fix all security vulnerabilities, malicious hackers need only find one in order to be in a position to hack your web application and tarnish your business reputation. Improve your web security posture - use the Netsparker web vulnerability scanner to automate vulnerability assessment and condense the triage process to identify security vulnerabilities before hackers exploit them.