Organizations in online industries such as e-commerce, banking and healthcare collect and provide access to data that can be classified as highly confidential.  This extremely sensitive information makes a rather tempting target for hackers looking to make their fame by compromising corporate systems and thieving critical data.  For the past three years, vulnerable web applications have lead to a number of dangerous exploits such as XSS (cross site scripting) and SQL injection, which count for a substantial amount of reported intrusions.  While security begins with proper implementation and configuration, one tool that can help put your organization on a secure path is a software technology known as web application scanning.

What is a Web Application Scanner?

A web application scanner is a type of software program with the ability to crawl an entire website and thoroughly analyze each essential component to access the overall level of security.

More advanced systems even combine testing with simulated attacks during the scanning process.  The average system is vulnerable to thousands of know security risks.  A web application scanner identifies these risks and compares them against a continuously updated database.

Web Application Scanning Features

The market for web application scanning solutions is expanding fast.  While the features vary depending on the product, below are qualities found in almost all web application scanners:

Vulnerability Detection – The main goal a web application scanner is to mitigate the most common threats to web application security.  This includes exploits such as cross site scripting that result in data theft and the execution of malicious code as well as techniques like SQL injection that lead to execution of unauthorized commands and tampering.  Even the simplest of applications are susceptible to exploit when not properly secured and a web application scanner can help you quickly identify them before disaster strikes.

Vulnerability Prioritizing – Time is of the essence when it comes to protecting your system against sophisticated attacks.  A web application scanner with the ability to identify security holes and prioritize the severity of those vulnerabilities can save precious time for researching and mitigating the problem.  Today’s smaller IT environments usually leave one individual to perform the duties of several.  Automated assessment scans can serve benefits to the smallest IT team while reducing the costs and complexities of network security.

Analyze Web Application Infrastructure – Web applications are the most targeted components of a website.  However, scanning traditional web applications alone is not enough.  The applications of the underlying infrastructure must also be taken into account.  A reliable web application scanner will perform critical assessment of vital components such as the operating system, web server, web services and neighboring systems as well.

Summary

Traditionally, the most common solution has been to test applications during the development stage.  However, a large majority of these applications are developed by third-parities, not the organizations that are actually use them.  This isn’t all corporations must worry about as the underlying operating system platform, desktop applications and the databases that interact with those web applications all serve as entry points and potential security risks.  Where the traditional testing methods fail, web application scanners offer a more robust and full testing measure.

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