10 Essential Web App Security Testing Tools For 2021
Tags: webdev, webapps
Published: 2020-12-15 07:45:57

Organizations are using web applications for finance, marketing automation and also for internal communication. While web applications offer convenience to organizations and clients, their pervasiveness makes them a popular attack target for cybercriminals. So web app security testing, or scanning and testing web app for risk is necessary. According to the report, web apps are a popular attack target in confirmed data breaches and in some industries up to 41% data breaches are web app related. Most web app related breaches takes several months or more for security teams to discover. The longer an attacker has access to systems, the more damage they can cause.

Though the company follows best practices to protect itself against common web application attacks, this will not be enough. A web application security scanner is a software program that performs automatic black-box testing on a web application and recognizes security vulnerabilities. Scanners don’t access the source code, they just perform functional testing and try to find security vulnerabilities. There are tools which can be used for web app security. Let’s see which are those.

#Web App Security Testing Tools-
**1. Netsparker-**
It is a dead accurate scanner that will identify vulnerabilities like SQL Injection and Cross-site Scripting in web apps and web APIs. This tool is available as both hosted as well as self-hosted solution and can be easily integrated with any type of test and dev environment. It uses automation to identify vulnerabilities and verify false positives so you don’t have to waste hours manually verifying the identified vulnerabilities once a scan is finished. It is available as a Windows software and an online service.

**2. Acunetix –**
It is a premium security testing tool that includes a completely automated network vulnerability scanner which detects and reports more than 50,000 known network vulnerabilities and misconfigurations. This tool discovers open ports and running services, assesses security of routers, firewalls, switches and load balancers, tests for weak passwords, DNS zone transfer, badly configured Proxy servers, weak SNMP community strings and TLS/SSL ciphers, among others.

It features innovative black box scanning and SPA crawling techniques in the form of AcuSensor and DeepScan resp. Multi-threaded, Deepscan crawler runs the uninterrupted scan of WordPress installation for more than thousand vulnerabilities. Login Sequence Recorder scans password-protected fields, and in-built vulnerability management system helps to generate various technical and compilance reports. 

**3. ZED Attack Proxy (ZAP)-**
ZAP is an open-source tool, especially designed to find out security vulnerabilities in the web app. It can be used as a scanner/filter of web app and able to run on Windows/Linux and Macintosh platforms. It stands as a “middle-man proxy” between a tester’s browser and web application and used to intercept and moderate the transmitted meesages. Some of the key features are- Passive scanning, automated scanner, REST-based API , Fuzzer, traditional and AJAX spiders etc.

**4. SQLMap-**
It is an open-source penetration testing tool which is used for detecting and exploiting SQL injection issues in apps. This tool comes with a command line interface. It has support of well known platforms like Linux, Apple Mac OS X, microsoft windows. All the available versions are free to download.

**5. Vega-**

Vega is a free open-source web vulnerability scanner and testing platform written in java and offers a GUI based environment. This tool can be used to find SQL injection, header injection, directory listing, shell injection, cross-site scripting, file inclusion and so on. It can also be extended using a powerful API written in Javascript. One can use Vega Scanner, Vega Proxy and Proxy Scanner and scan with credentials. 

**6. Grabber-**
It is a simple and portable web app scanner which is used to detect many security vulnerabilities in web applications. This tool is developed in Python and an executable version is also available if you need it. Grabber scans and tells where the vulnerability exists. It detects the vulnerabilities like- ajax testing , cross-site scripting, sql injection, file inclusion, JS source code analyzer, Backup file check etc.

**7. BeEF-**
Know more at- [https://solaceinfotech.com/blog/11-essential-web-app-security-testing-tools-for-2021/]