Web Application Scanning: Everything You Need to Know

With technology advancing so rapidly, cybercriminals continue to infiltrate websites looking for gaps and vulnerabilities to exploit. These activities include stealing data, crashing websites, uploading malicious content, and sabotaging services.

The cost of such breaches can be enormous, whether it’s a loss of customers, finances, goodwill, or reputation. As of 2021, the average cost of data breaches stood at $4.24 million, a 10% increase from the previous year. So enterprises have to ensure to conduct regular scans on their application or website to maintain high security, uptime, and compliance with regulations.

This article sheds light on all the things you need to know about web application scanning, and how to get started.

What Is Web Application Scanning?

Web application scanning involves running automated monitoring and scans to check for security vulnerabilities or breaches. As businesses grow and websites get more complex, it’s important to identify gaps in your website and fix them—no matter how small. This makes an automated web application scanner a key tool for every site.

Having an automated scanner helps analyze the elements, logic, processes, and third-party software that make up your website. By doing so, the scanner identifies issues early before they escalate, or hackers exploit them. Some of these vulnerabilities can include unpatched software, unauthorized access, cross-site scripting (XSS), injection attacks, and more.

Read more: Seven Principles of Testing

The Significance of Application Scanning

Let’s have a look at the advantages of having an automated web application scanner:

• Detects and fixes vulnerabilities early:If undetected in time, any site vulnerability can lead to data loss, unauthorized data access and misuse, downtime, or worse, a loss of business. So it’s essential to scan and fix these vulnerabilities as soon as possible.
• Get detailed reports on site health: The vulnerability scanner offers easy-to-understand reports and insights on every vulnerability encountered. This way, you can take corrective measures to strengthen your site security.
• Ensure compliance with security standards: For businesses that hold sensitive data, ensuring compliance with regulatory standards is critical. A vulnerability scanner helps to monitor your site for security vulnerabilities and compliance.
• High uptime: Downtime leads to loss of business and reduced productivity. With a web application scanner, you can ensure that your site operates per your SLA. Read more on the costs of website downtime.

Traditional Methods of Web Application Scanning

There are several tools available for web application scanning. They aim to identify and address common vulnerabilities. You can find examples of these vulnerabilities on the OWASP Top 10 Vulnerabilities of 2021. They include:

1. Broken Access Control
2. Cryptographic Failures
3. Injection
4. Insecure Design
5. Security Misconfiguration
6. Vulnerable and Outdated Components
7. Identification and Authentication Failures
8. Software and Data Integrity Failures
9. Security Logging and Monitoring Failures
10. Server-Side Request Forgery

In some instances, enterprises conduct penetration testing and monitoring manually. This solution, however, is not very effective—especially in this day and age with the advent of cloud solutions and remote work. Many businesses no longer use tightly coupled on-prem applications. Rather, they rely on APIs to connect servers, databases, and subsystems.

The practice of conducting manual pen-testing exposes your company to the risk of data loss, downtime, and loss of revenue. These tests can’t keep up with the avalanche of upgrades and releases modern sites need—or even cyberattacks.

Automated Testing: Why Legacy Methods Don’t Work

Regrettably, having automated web application scanners isn’t enough to keep a modern website free of vulnerabilities. Most automated security scanners only focus on the production environment, completely ignoring the code base, build, and integrations. Your solution should protect your site beginning from integration and staging environments to production.

Besides this, automated web application tests should encompass other areas too, including automated UI tests, SEO, accessibility, and source codes. It should provide complete security coverage of your entire site, protecting your brand from reputational damage and loss of revenue. It should also ensure continuous improvements of the site with critical insights and regular patches.

Uptime By Oshyn: 360-Degree Web Application Scanning

Enterprises need a complete security solution with features built to cover every stage of the development process. Web application scanning is vital, but you can’t stop there. Uptime by Oshyn is a powerful solution that offers continuous security, monitoring, and optimization of your website, giving you complete security coverage of your architecture.

Uptime by Oshyn redefines web application testing by assuring marketers and business owners that their site is secure and available. Here are the reason to consider Uptime by Oshyn as your ideal web application security solution:

• Performance scanning: This solution helps identify potential issues before they become severe, negatively impacting your brand reputation, customer experience, and revenue.
• Release management: Adopting Uptime by Oshyn enables faster site deployment through automation. It scans application source code for vulnerabilities, ensuring seamless continuous deployment to production.
• SEO scanning: Even if your site is secure, poor visibility will hurt your brand. This solution ensures your site ranks high on search engines by following SEO best practices.
• Automated testing: By regularly conducting site audits and tests, this solution ensures the discovery of vulnerabilities before they negatively impact your site.
• Accessibility testing: You should ensure to have a site that’s usable for as many people as possible. This means having consideration for people with disabilities. Uptime by Oshyn helps to test your site for accessibility and provides ways to improve it.
• Dashboards and reports: Having access to an extensive dashboard and report leads to significant amounts of valuable data and insight on your site health.
• Automated patching: Regular patching is an effective means of improving reliability. This ensures you have the most up-to-date resources when they become available, making upgrades so much easier.

Ready to try out Uptime by Oshyn? Reach out to the Oshyn team.