Everything You Need to Know About Web Pentesting: A Complete Guide

It's critical to ensure that your website is secure if you're running one. Hackers are always looking for vulnerabilities to exploit, and if they can find one on your site, they could do serious damage. That's where web penetration testing comes into the scene. Web penetration testing is the act of detecting and exploiting security flaws on a website. In this post, we'll go through what web pentesting is, why you need it, and how to use it to safeguard your site. We'll also look at some of the top web pentesting tools available, both open source and commercial.

What Is Web Pentesting?

Web application penetration testing, often known as web application security testing, is the activity of detecting and exploiting vulnerabilities in web applications. Pentesting can be used to find both known and unknown vulnerabilities. Once a vulnerability has been discovered, the tester may try to exploit it in order to steal confidential information or gain control of the system.

Why Do You Need Web Pentesting?

There are many reasons why you might need to pentest your website. Maybe you're launching a new site and want to make sure it's secure before going live. Or maybe you've had an incident where your site was hacked, and you want to prevent it from happening again. Either way, web pentesting can help you identify and fix potential security issues before they're exploited.

List of Top Web Pentesting Tools Open Source and Commercial

There are a number of available, both open source and commercial. Here are some of the top options:

Open Source:

• Wapiti
• SQLMap
• SonarQube

Commercial:

• Astra's Pentest
• Netsparker
• Acunetix

Methodology for Web Pentesting

• Information Gathering: The pentester attempts to discover fingerprints in the backend of a website while gathering information. It usually contains things such as the Server OS, CMS version, etc.
• Discovery: The second stage is where automatic tools are used to reveal any known security flaws or CVEs that may exist in the services. Because these sorts of holes are frequently missed by automated tool scans, a manual engineering inspection is also necessary to find business logic vulnerabilities.
• Exploitation: In the last stage of exploitation, any vulnerabilities discovered in the first phase are used. The exploitation portion is also utilized to exfiltrate data from the target and keep access.

How Can Web Pentesting Help You Achieve Compliance?

Web pentesting can help you achieve compliance with security standards by identifying and fixing potential vulnerabilities before they're exploited. You can safeguard your consumers' data and avoid hefty fines and damage by ensuring that your website is secure.

Web Pentesting Checklist

To make sure you're pentesting your website effectively, here's a checklist of things to keep in mind:

• Understand the web application architecture
• Identify the most important assets on the site
• Perform an initial scan with automated tools
• Manually inspect the code for vulnerabilities
• Exfiltrate data and take control of the system

By following these steps, you can ensure that your website is secure and compliant with security standards.

Further Exploring the Top Web Pentesting Tools Open Source 

Wapiti

Wapiti is a free, open-source project from SourceForge that performs black box testing of web applications. Wapiti uses black box testing to analyze web apps for potential security flaws. Because it's a command-line program, you'll need to be familiar with various Wapiti commands.

Wapiti is simple to use for veterans but may be difficult for novices. Wapiti injects payloads into a website to determine whether it's vulnerable or not. This particular open-source security testing tool can handle both GET and POSTHTTP assaults.

SQLMap

SQLMap is a free, open-source tool that allows you to automate the detection and exploitation of database-based SQL injection flaws. The security testing software has a strong testing engine that can be used to test for six types of SQL injection attacks, namely — 

• Boolean-based blind
• Error-based
• Out-of-band
• Time-based blind
• Stacked queries
• UNION query

SonarQube

The popular open-source security testing software is SonarQube. It's used to assess the quality of a website application's code as well as identify security flaws. Despite the fact that it is written in Java, SonarQube may analyze more than 20 different programming languages. SonarQube identifies issues and displays them in green or red light.

The first deals with low-risk vulnerabilities and problems, whereas the latter refers to severe ones. Command prompt access is available for more experienced users. There is an interactive user interface (GUI) for individuals who are just getting started in testing. 

Further Exploring the Top Web Pentesting Tools Commercial

Astra's Pentest

Astra Security was founded with the goal of making online application security easier for end users. The spirit of Astra's Pentest has been taken into everyday life as part of its ethos. There are several benefits to using this web application penetration testing solution. For example, you may connect CI/CD tools with the Astra pentest suite such that an automated scan is triggered whenever there is a code update.

You may also connect it to, for example, Jira or Slack so that you may assign pentest and recovery-related activities to your team members without them having access to the suite. Of course, the pentest suite allows you to converse with software developers and security experts.

Netsparker

Netsparker is an online application and web API security tool that can find SQL Injection and Cross-site Scripting vulnerabilities. Netsparker proves the verified problems are genuine instead of false positives by uniquely validating them. 

As a result, you won't have to waste hours manually checking each identified vulnerability after a scan is completed. It's accessible as a Windows program and an online service. 

Acunetix

Acunetix is a fully automated web application vulnerability scanner that finds and reports on over 4,500 web application security flaws, including all variants of SQL Injection and XSS. 

It complements the job of a penetration tester by automating activities that may take hours to execute manually while still providing correct answers in record time. 

Acunetix supports HTML5, JavaScript, and Single-page applications, as well as CMS systems. It has powerful manual tools for penetration testers and works with popular Issue Trackers and WAFs. 

Conclusion

Because it ensures the safety and security of your website, web penetration testing is critical. You may repair potential vulnerabilities before they are exploited by hackers by performing web penetration tests. There are a variety of different types of web penetration testing software available, both open source and commercial. In this article, we've discussed some of the top web pentesting tools to help you get started in testing the security of your website.