Studies show that over 30,000 websites are hacked each day. Most of these attacks mainly target small businesses that don’t have robust security systems to safeguard their websites. These attacks can turn out to be costly depending on the level of access these attackers get when they compromise a website or application.
If you own or manage a website, it is crucial to make security one of your major priorities. Most people usually prioritize performance, SEO, and user experience but forget that the security of their website also deserves the same level of priority. One of the first steps you need to take to assess the security of your website is hiring or outsourcing experts to penetration test it.
In this article, I will share with you everything you need to know about penetration testing for web applications and how it can help you assess and improve your website’s security. I will discuss the different types of penetration testing, the benefits, and how it is done. Let’s get started.
What is website/web app penetration testing?
Penetration testing for web applications involves simulating attacks on the web app or website to get access to sensitive data with the goal of assessing the site’s or app’s level of security. These attacks can be simulated internally or externally to ensure there are no loopholes on both ends. If you are running a small business without a full-time cybersecurity team, it would be best to outsource this task to a web application penetration testing services provider like WizardCyber.
After penetration testing, the cyber security team or service provider that has performed the task are required to prepare a report with full details of the vulnerabilities in the web application and how they can be patched to prevent potential attacks. The testing should also be tailored to the organization’s needs by using techniques that attackers will most likely use when targeting the kind of website being tested.
Type of web application penetration testing
As we shared earlier, there are mainly two types of web application penetration testing, including internal penetration testing and external penetration testing. Let’s explain each of these in detail.
Internal penetration testing
This test simulates how an attacker would compromise the web application if they had internal access. It is important to note that people within the organization are also potential attackers. That’s why it is advisable to do both internal and external penetration testing for your web applications and websites. This will give you full details of what needs to be done to ensure your website or web application is full-proof from any form of internal attacks.
External penetration testing
With external penetration testing, the cyber security expert simulates attacks from the outside, like an attacker who only has a few details about the app or website. External penetration testing needs to be done by a third-party provider who doesn’t know much about how the website or application is run internally. While carrying out the test, the expert is only given a list of the organization’s IPs and domains.
Why you should do penetration testing of your web application
Any penetration testing project will involve spending some money that most organizations may not feel comfortable spending. However, spending on penetration testing is worth it because of the following reasons;
- It highlights weaknesses in your authentication system. With this information, you can tighten your authentication system to ensure all users are properly authenticated before gaining access to your website.
- It helps identify any database injection errors & poor session management
- Improves the resilience of your website or web application to the most common attacks.
- These tests will help you detect flaws in application logic & input validation errors.
- It ensures your website complies with known cybersecurity standards and regulations, such as the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
- To identify any loopholes that could lead to disastrous data breaches & operational disruption.
With the above benefits, it is very important to conduct regular penetration testing to ensure your website is safeguarded from attacks that could bring its operation to a standstill.
Manual vs automated penetration testing
Automated penetration testing involves using automated tools to simulate common attacks that most hackers use to compromise websites. Performing automated penetration testing doesn’t require a lot of cybersecurity experience since the testing tool does most of the heavy lifting. It is cheaper and usually takes less time.
With manual penetration testing, the simulated attacks are performed by a competent cybersecurity expert. These experts use hacker-style techniques to identify any loopholes in the web application that they can use to compromise it. This usually takes more time and is relatively more expensive than automated penetration testing.
However, the benefit of manual penetration testing is that it doesn’t lead to false positives. It is also deep, exhaustive and more reliable since it simulates what exactly would happen in the real world if an attacker was to make an attempt to access a given website or web application. The security experts doing these tests also prepare a comprehensive report with detailed information about the vulnerabilities in your website and how they can be fixed.
Sometimes experts may carry out automated tests in order to get an idea of where to start. It should also be noted that some compliance regulations, such as PCI-DSS, require manual penetration testing. So, if you want your website to be compliant with these regulations, carrying out a manual penetration test is the way to go.
There are also some website and web application flaws that can best be identified by carrying out manual penetration testing. Some of these flaws include template injection, broken access control, blind SQL injection, business logic errors, cross-site request forgery, and dom-based cross-site scripting.
How web application penetration testing is done
There are four major phases of penetration testing, including planning, pre-attack, attack, and post-attack. All these phases have to be well-executed for the penetration testing project to be rendered successful. Let me explain each of these phases in detail.
Planning phase
This is the first phase of any penetration testing project. At this phase, the service provider and the organization need to agree on the scope of the project, the timeline, and the people involved. When it comes to scope, some of the things that need to be agreed upon include the pages that are to be tested and determining whether to do internal or external tests or both.
Of course, some of these decisions can be influenced by the budget of the organization and what the experts think is the best option. In addition to the scope, the penetration testing project needs to have a clear timeline to avoid dragging it for a long. The timeline largely depends on the scope of the project.
Pre-attack phase
This stage is at times referred to as the vulnerability detection phase because it mainly involves detecting the loopholes in the website of web applications that can be used to launch an attack. This includes looking at all the information in the public domain that can be used as starting point to access any of the organizations’ user accounts.
It also includes assessing the authentication process to determine the loopholes that can be taken advantage of. Some of the tools that are used for vulnerability testing include Nmap, Shodan, Google Dorks, and dnsdumpster. This stage may also involve social engineering some of the organization’s staff in order to obtain crucial information that can be used to log into their account.
Attack phase
After identifying vulnerabilities in the previous phase, the penetration tester can now start exploiting them to see how much access he gets to the organization’s sensitive data. The penetration tester has to look at all the possibilities of exploiting every vulnerability in the website or web application.
Post-attack phase
This phase usually involves preparing a comprehensive report about the project. The report must include the full list of vulnerabilities and their risk level, the exploits executed, and the recommendation of what the organization should do to fix all vulnerabilities. After preparing the report, the penetration tester needs to restore the system back to its original state.
For better results, it is always best for the organization to continue operating normally. The employees shouldn’t even be told of any testing going on. This ensures that the simulated attacks are as close to real life as possible.
Final thoughts
I hope this article has answered most of your questions about your website’s security and why you need to consider doing regular penetration testing if you want your website or web app to always be secure. No matter the size of your website or app, carrying out regular penetration tests is recommended to avoid interruption of your operations and potential financial losses if attackers ever compromise it.
