Web Application Security Testing Service
Services offered through web applications are constantly attacked by hackers due to their easy access and having too many attack vectors. Web application penetration testing service (also known as web application security testing service) is performed by white-hat S4E cybersecurity experts who act as a hacker without any harm to find the vulnerabilities in the application in order to fix them.
You can find our cybersecurity experts’ web application security testing service certification below. These web application security testing service certifications show the level of accomplishment and perseverance for our work. Please check our achievements and certifications from here.
Download Sample Web Application Security Testing Service Report
If you want to learn about our methodology, web app risks, vulnerabilities, and stuff like these, you have to scroll a bit more ;)
Web Application
Pentest Methodology
of Security for Everyone
What are The Web Application Risks?
Data Breach
An average SMB processes lots of critical data such as emails, PII, financial data, etc. The biggest problem for your company can be a leak of data for which you are responsible.
Legal Issues
Your company can be the subject of different punitive sanctions according to the regulations of your country.
Reputational Damage
According to us, it is the worst case. Your company can lose customers' and partners' trust.
Service Outages
Malicious hackers can exploit some vulnerabilities if it has not been fixed before. And this can cause permanent service interruptions. This is much more costly than finding and fixing security vulnerabilities beforehand.
Data Losses
Except for service outages, your digital data may corrupt and not be available anymore. You can get a consultation from our cyber security expert team on determining the best techniques to minimize possible data loss.
Web Application Security Testing Service Methodology of Security for Everyone
1. Detection of Web Application Security Testing Service Scope / Initial Meeting
During the initial meeting phase of the web application security testing service, we discuss the web application penetration testing service scope. The penetration test type and information that will share are decided in this meeting. Also, we ask some questions to our customers about the data and logic flow of an application.
Our highly trained cybersecurity experts will perform web application penetration testing services. We use the S4E:Shelter, an automatic vulnerability assessment app we have developed, and various automated tools while performing web application penetration testing services. However, we only use these tools to make the process faster. In the penetration testing process, critical tasks and controls are performed by the S4E cyber security team.
In a professional web application penetration testing service, an agreement must contain each test's start and finish date. However, your assets are exposed to tens of thousands of malicious hackers attack online every day. Therefore, all risks must be evaluated in a limited time, and the right test type scope must be selected for web application penetration testing service to complete the tests most efficiently. If an incorrect roadmap is determined at this step, it may cause an underestimation of risks.
In summary, the most critical step in measuring the real risks of your digital assets is to determine the most appropriate method and scope for web application security testing while working with an expert cybersecurity team.
At a minimum, the following issues should be decided in the scoping phase of web application security testing service:
- What does the application do: It is essential to understand how the app works.
- Authorization mechanism of the application: What kind of authorizations are there?
- Test accounts: Having at least 2 test accounts for each authorization will make the job much easier.
- Test environment: Whether web application penetration testing service will be performed in a test environment or production environment.
- Third-party integrations: Could it be a possible attack from third-party software?
- Threat intelligence: Can we use information gathered from threat intelligence in our tests?
- Access to source code: We can detect security vulnerabilities by static code analyzes also.
- Deadlines: Start and finish times of the test and report submission date must be decided.
- All the work mentioned above works for white or gray-box tests. Some customers might give only an organization name or domain and ask us to start there. Such tests are called black-box tests.
2. Information Gathering
In this step, we collect information about your assets both using passive and active methods.
Passive information gathering refers to gathering information about an asset without leaving a trace. Active information gathering refers to gathering information about an asset with interacting with it. Therefore, active methods leave traces on the system.
The information gathered in this step will help identify the attack vectors used in the following steps.
3. Analysis / Vulnerability Detection
In this step, vulnerabilities are detected using various tools and manual processes. Also, our cybersecurity experts take evidence of each vulnerability to use in the reporting steps.
Quick & Easy
4. Exploitation
In this step, our web application penetration testing service experts try to exploit the vulnerabilities by using information they gathered from a hacker's point of view. The primary purpose is to show the real risks. In this step, we attack apps and try to do some malicious things such as access to sensitive information owned by the company, run commands at the operating system level, bypass restrictions, upload a harmful file, etc.
Our cybersecurity experts use the necessary attack techniques without harming the systems to show what a malicious hacker can do in this step.
5. Reporting
The last step is to report all the vulnerabilities and findings to our customers. A good report must be written in a simple language, understandable by the developers, supported by screenshots, and it must be avoided to give unnecessary information.
You can download a free web application penetration testing service report if you want to.
A closing meeting could be done to give the best contribution in some cases.
6. Regression Tests
We check the vulnerabilities in the report after our customer applied the fixes. During this regression step which we offer for free, we ensure that the vulnerabilities are entirely fixed.
Web Application VulnerabilitiesWeb Applications Security Vulnerabilities
If you are still reading this, you might have heard about OWASP (The Open Web Application Security Project). OWASP is a non-profit foundation that works on application security. They published a list that they collected from various areas on the ten most crucial web application vulnerabilities.
It would be beneficial to look at the list even though the vulnerabilities are not limited to what is listed below.
Injection
It happens when an input is used in a part of a command or query without any filtering. SQL, NoSQL, OS Command, and LDAP injection vulnerabilities can be given as examples.
Broken Authentication
Malicious hackers can bypass authorization due to misconfiguration or insecure authentication mechanisms. Although it is a very dangerous vulnerability, it is one of the most common.
Broken Access Control
If the checks are erroneous in the fields that need authentication, malicious hackers can access them without authentication. In addition, these misconfigurations can result in unauthorized actions in the apps.
XML External Entities (XXE)
Critical vulnerabilities may occur due to incomplete or incorrectly configured XML processors’ (usually third-party software) processing some crafted XML data. Attackers can perform malicious activities such as internal network port scanning, remote command execution, denial of service, disclosing internal files by changing the content of XML data and sending them to the applications.
Sensitive Data Exposure
This is the type of vulnerability resulting from exposure of sensitive data of a web application due to an error. This sensitive data may include users' username, password, credit card, address, phone numbers, or company information like internal correspondences, emails, documents, etc. Many big companies like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn have been affected by this vulnerability, and billions of users' information ended up in attackers' hands.
Security Misconfiguration
Security misconfiguration is one of the most common vulnerabilities. The most common mistakes can be listed as not changing the default configurations, keeping the data in the public cloud storages, misconfigurations of HTTP headers, exposure of error messages that contain sensitive data, etc. These vulnerabilities are one of the most easy-to-solve vulnerabilities and but yet have high effects.
Cross-Site Scripting XSS
These vulnerabilities allow attackers to run javascript code on users' browsers. An attacker who can trigger XSS vulnerability can do many harmful things, from capturing user token information to attacking all of the application’s end users.
Insecure Deserialization
This vulnerability occurs when user-controlled data deserialize by an application. This situation allows attackers to run some malicious code in the application or change the data itself. Attackers can do malicious things such as remote code execution, reading internal files, or privilege escalation using the vulnerability.
Using Components with Known Vulnerabilities
Vulnerabilities may not always occur in the codebase in-house developed but also in 3rd party components. Therefore, it is necessary to check the components used in the applications to get the new updates and apply the published updates immediately.
Insufficient Logging & Monitoring
Insufficient logging and monitoring can causes an inability to catch how and by whom a cyberattack occurred. The latest researches show that the detection time of a successful cyber attack is more than 200 days. It is also observed that external sources make these detections (like threat intel service, publicize of leaked data), not with the help of companies’ logging or monitoring systems. In the security tests performed by S4E Team, we made suggestions to fully collect the necessary track records by working with the customer.