SBN

Website Vulnerability Assessment to Protect Website from High Risk of Cyberattack

Website vulnerability assessment is a systematic review of the gaps or weaknesses in the IT systems of a company. It identifies, classifies, and prioritizes the security glitches and offers remedial measures or mitigation steps to fix them. You can find these vulnerabilities in third-party vendor-managed applications or any internally made software too. A web application vulnerability assessment procedure is a must-do for any enterprise as it gives an in-depth view of the security risks helping it safeguard sensitive data and information technology from plausible cyber threats. Let’s unearth some of its benefits and the required tools to help in website vulnerability scanning and assessment.

Benefits of Website Vulnerability Assessment 


In today’s age of advanced cyberattacks, it is mandatory to have regular website vulnerability assessments done for every organization. They check the website for security vulnerabilities, apprise them of the loopholes in terms of a data breach and security threats, but also give a proper direction on how to understand the overall security gaps, assets available, and the risks involved. 

  1. It allows you to identify the security exposure before cyber attackers can find them.
  2. It creates an inventory of all the devices for planning upgrades and any future assessments.
  3. It makes a list of all the devices on the network, including vulnerabilities linked to each device, the purpose of the device, and more.
  4. It checks and defines the risk level on the network.
  5. It helps you understand your IT infrastructure, the security gaps, and the overall risk. This, in turn, improves the information security and application security standards.
  6. It helps you comply with applicable International and Federal regulations.
  7. It enhances the enterprise’s goodwill and reputation amongst current and future customers. 
  8. It protects the integrity of assets if there is a malicious code in any of them.  

Threats Prevented Through A Vulnerability Assessment


Cyberattacks are getting more and more sophisticated, and it is essential to be able to safeguard against them and nip them in the bud. The website vulnerability assessment allows for many hideous cyberattacks to be prevented.

1. SQL injection attacks- These kinds of attacks occur when invalidated data is sent to a code interpreter from another data submission field in a website application. Such attacks can lead to data corruption, data leaks, loss of accountability, data breaches, and access denial.

2. Privilege escalation attacks– Such attacks happen when a programming error is exploited, or there is a design flaw or access control in an operating system to get access to resources that are usually protected from a user or application. This gives attackers access to sensitive data, install malware, and launch more cyberattacks.

3. XSS attacks – Cross-site scripting (XSS) allows attackers to install client-side scripts into web pages viewed by others and used to bypass access control. They can lead to huge cybersecurity risks depending on data sensitivity.

Web Application Vulnerability Assessment Tools


With such high-risk threats to the organization, it is pertinent for the enterprise to make website vulnerability scanning and assessment a part of the process and do it regularly. It might be a sizable investment, but the benefits you reap out of it, in the long run, are worth every penny spent. 

There are different types of tools to scan for existing and new threats that could target your application.

  1. Web application scanners to test and simulate existing attack patterns.
  2. Network scanners to visualize networks and look out for any warning signals such as spoofed packets, stray IP addresses, and doubtful packet generation from one IP address.

These Web Application Vulnerability Scanners or tools look for gaps such as Cross-site scripting, Command Injection, SQL Injection, insecure server configuration, and Path Traversal. They are called Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST) Tools and are available in the market for free, paid, and open source. You can get most of the free and paid ones on GitHub. Some of the recommended scanners trending in 2021 are:

Conclusion

Bug bounty programs, security researchers, and program vendors are discovering new vulnerabilities. These gaps are mainly due to coding errors or security misconfigurations. Thus, a website vulnerability assessment is important. It informs enterprises about the weaknesses in the systems and ways to reduce the risks caused by them. Therefore, if you are interested in reducing your organization’s security risk, a vulnerability assessment is a great place to begin. It will do a thorough study of software and hardware assets, locating all the vulnerabilities and giving an intuitive risk score. So, go ahead and get your company’s vulnerability assessment done before attackers find a way in. 

web application security banner

The post Website Vulnerability Assessment to Protect Website from High Risk of Cyberattack appeared first on Indusface.

*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Indusface authored by Ritika Singh. Read the original post at: https://www.indusface.com/blog/website-vulnerability-assessment-to-protect-website-from-high-risk-of-cyberattack/