What is a Vulnerability Analysis?
Assessment of vulnerability testing process that identifies and assigns severity levels to security defects within a given time frame. The vulnerability assessment process can include manual or automated methods with different levels of consistency and an emphasis upon comprehensive coverage. Vulnerability assessments can also target different layers of technology with the help of a risk-based approach. The most common are network-, host and application-layer assessments.
There is a difference between Network Vulnerability Assessment (Web Vulnerability Assessment) and Network Vulnerability Assessment (Network Vulnerability Assessment).
The increasing sophistication of hacking attacks is a result of the technology’s constant advancement. This can be seen as a warning sign to organizations concerned about their security. This is why these organizations need to use the best security practices for their web applications to protect their brand and reputation, as well as prevent financial loss.
Two key methods can be used to assess the security of web applications when designing them.
Assessment of web vulnerability
Web application penetration testing
Web vulnerability assessments will allow you to quickly identify potential weaknesses by crawling the website. This task can be accomplished using a variety of open-source or commercial vulnerability scanning tools. A comprehensive assessment of vulnerability although they share many of the same processes as those used in penetration tests, the results they produce are quite different.
Web application penetration testing can be done more totally. This includes using both manual and automated methods, such as scripts and interactive tools, and following a proven approach. A penetration test identifies vulnerabilities and attempts to exploit them.
A penetration test is a process that involves reconnaissance, mapping, discovery, and subsequent exploitation of vulnerabilities. As we have discussed, Assessments of vulnerability and penetration tests they almost all follow the same process because they both start with:
- Reconnaissance
This phase collects information about the web app via direct and indirect means such as web search results, DNS records, and other information.
- Mapping
This phase involves downloading the website, detecting any problems with the webserver or software configuration, and then repairing them.
- Discovery
Does this phase identify vulnerabilities such as SQL Injection?Cross-Site Scripting (“XSS”)?Information leakage and cross-Site Request Forgery. The vulnerability assessment is completed at this stage. However, the penetration test adds another phase to the process.
- Exploitation
This phase aims to exploit vulnerabilities found to simulate real-world attacks.
Dangerous Vulnerabilities
Below is a list of some of the most dangerous vulnerabilities you could face.
- Remote Inclusion
Remote file inclusion is when a file from another server is inserted into a website. This is possible to display content from a remote website. This attack could also occur accidentally, due to misconfigurations of the programming language or during execution.
- ASP Code Injection
An attacker can use this vulnerability to inject custom code into a server-side scripting engine. This attack occurs when an attacker can control part or all the input string that is passed into an eval() command, which results in code execution.
- SQL Injection
This attack attempts to access or corrupt database content using application code. This attack is carried out via a Web request. The Web user input is incorrectly filtered for string literal escape characters that could be embedded in your SQL statements, or not properly sanitized. It is then suddenly interpreted as SQL.
- Cross-Site Scripting (“XSS”)
An XSS attack involves malicious HTML or client-side scripts being injected into Web pages viewed and accessed by other users. This bypasses access controls that browsers use to make sure requests come from the same domain. XSS attacks allow an attacker to gain access to session cookies, confidential pages content, and other client-side objects.
- Full Path Disclosure (FPD).
This vulnerability allows an attacker to see the webroot/file path. E.g. : /home/omg/htdocs/file/. For some vulnerabilities, such as loading the load_file() query inside a SQL Injection query to view the page source (or any other), the attacker will need to know the full path to the file that they wish to view.
- Directory Traversal
This exploit allows attackers to gain unauthorized access to files and directories that are restricted. Directory traversal is also known as path traversal. It uses web server software to bypass insufficient security mechanisms to gain access to files and directories that are not within the webroot folder.
Vulnerability scanning tools 2021
- Comodo cWatch Web
- Acunetix WVS
- AppSpider
- Grabber
- Nikto
Here are some of the most commonly used assessment tools for vulnerability include:
- Comodo cWatch Web
This web security tool is a Managed Security Service apt for websites and applications. It provides vulnerability scanning for businesses and online merchants as well as other service providers who deal with credit cards online. It makes it easy and automatic to comply with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard. Comodo Security Information and Event Management process vulnerability information from the web, application, and network scanners. The Comodo Web Application Firewall (WAF) that comes along with this vulnerability assessment tool is also capable of eliminating application vulnerabilities and protecting web applications and websites against advanced attacks like SQL Injection, Cross-Site Scripting, and Denial-of-Service (DDoS). This WAF is thus incorporated with vulnerability scanning, malware scanning, and automatic virtual patching and hardening engines.
- Acunetix WVS
This scanner can be used with XSS black box scanning technology and SQL injection. It can automatically crawl websites and execute grey box and black box hacking techniques to detect potential vulnerabilities that could compromise your website or sensitive data.
- AppSpider
This vulnerability scanner collects all information necessary to test all apps. AppSpider lets you scan all new apps and prepares for what’s next.
- Grabber
This web application scanner can detect vulnerabilities on your website. This software is simple and can scan small websites such as forums, personals, and others.
- Nikto
This web server scanner is Open Source (GPL) and can run extensive tests against multiple web servers. It also checks for obsolete versions of web servers. It can also check for server configuration items, such as multiple index files or HTTP server options.