The Importance of Web Application Penetration Testing

Article Written By: Julio Carmona

What's more important: application penetration testing or simply assessing the vulnerability of your system? Does anyone in your company know key information about your systems? Obviously, you'll have employees that already know key information about your systems. The sad truth is you can't completely trust every employee, especially former staff that has been fired. Web application penetration testing goes beyond just highlighting vulnerabilities. It actually makes sure nobody is interfering in your system, including your own people or people who have previously worked for you.

What is Application Penetration Testing?

Quite labor intensive, this job requires a deeply experienced knowledge in many security testing tools and strategies. I once had a computer geek friend in college who conducted testing on his university's computer system. An amazing but honest nerd, he broke in, but then told the university about the vulnerabilities he discovered. They threatened to expel him, even though now a days he makes his living doing this same kind of application penetration testing for large corporations. He didn't even change his grade, didn't need to, but he learned some hands on experience for his job.

PCI compliance offers a limited automated test that don't identify all security openings. Application penetration testing does a more thorough review to identify all potential security problems and get them fixed.

Application penetration testing checks for a number of vulnerabilities, including buffer overflow, input validation, cross site scripting, URL manipulation, SQL injection, Cookie modification, bypassing authentication, and code execution. The testing has to be comprehensive and regular. Ideally, daily checks are best. It first identifies all ports, scanning and identifying the associated running services. Software services are then analyzed through automated as well as manual tests to identify weaknesses. Once a vulnerability is identified, the weakness is exploited in order to test and fix the issue. If you simply assess the vulnerability without exploiting the weakness to find a solution, you really aren't getting the most out of your website application penetration testing services.

Once these vulnerabilities are identified, a solution is found and then retested to make sure it is completely secure. Application penetration testing assesses every security detail about a website for complete trust and confidence.

About the Author

Mario - Application Penetration Testing. Find more information about Web-Application Penetration Testing here.

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This Article Has Been Published on Sat, 17 Apr 2010 and Read 430 Times

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