Do you ever face some malicious activities while surfing on the internet? You click to open a link, and some unwanted advertisement comes up, or you see some unwanted pop-ups. These are all activities implanted by a hacker on the site you wish to visit as a part of cyber-crime.

Penetration testing or pen testing is the best way to assess loopholes in an organization’s internet-facing applications to avoid a cyber-attack. In penetration testing, a group of professionals simulates a hacker’s activities and breaks into the organization’s system to detect the deficiencies and shortcomings present.

Once the pen-testing process completes, a report can be generated that provides all the involved risks and a directory for mitigation of these risks.

What is Web Application Penetration Testing

Web applications are a crucial part of a business’s success and the most favorite hackers’ target to steal personal information and destroy its reputation. Whitehat security testing & audit includes processes to discover faults and vulnerabilities present in them and analyze the attacks that will hamper the system due to these vulnerabilities.

The vulnerabilities can include weak session management, broken access controls, security misconfigurations, injection flaws, loopholes in-app logic, authentication weaknesses, input validation problems, and database interaction errors.

This process tests web applications, browsers, databases, back-end, source-code, and components like Plugins, Applets, Silverlight, Scriptlets, and so on.

A web app penetration testing is a complex test that involves a comprehensive and descriptive process. Due to the complex nature of testing, it is more time-consuming than other pen testing procedures.

Why do we need Web Application Penetration Testing?

As we dive deeper into the digital world, more web apps are coming into existence and need to function well to be competitive. The need for web app pen-testing arises to figure out the security issues and the vulnerabilities.

Penetration testing for a web app must be included as a part of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) to avoid any stress post-production deployment. There are certain programming errors that one makes and might leave all the confidential information exposed to the outer world.

Pen testing detects not only the vulnerabilities or threats but also checks for the efficiency of the security policies that are opted, test components like DNS, routers, and firewalls that are exposed to the outer world; find routes that a criminal can use to attack the web app and find a suitable approach to resolve these problems.

Steps to Perform Web Application Penetration Testing

Pen testing a web application aims to gather the web app’s details and map out the network involved to host it. It includes investigating the entry points for injection or the possible attacks.

It has the following steps

1. To gather relevant information

Information gathering is the first phase of a web app pen testing that involves the planning and collecting information phase or the reconnaissance phase. This is the most crucial step that paves a path to define the vulnerabilities with ease in the further process.

Reconnaissance is of two types based on the type of interaction to achieve with the system:

1. Passive Reconnaissance

This means gathering information that is readily available over the internet without any interaction with the target system. Professionals perform this step with the aid of various websites, starting with Google. It involves using links, Google syntax, subdomains, previous versions, and so on.

One can simplify the google search results as follows:

site:*.domain.com

For example: site:.*youtube.com

2. Active Reconnaissance

Active reconnaissance involves a direct interaction with the target system to fetch all the required details. There are various methods for active reconnaissance like:

• Fingerprinting using Nmap- This involves gathering details about the scripting language, currently running services, server software and version, Operating system of the server used for the web app.
• Shodan Network Scanner– This helps to identify additional details about the web application regarding port numbers opened, geolocation, server software used, or the publicly available IP it scans.
• DNS Forward and Reverse Lookup- It helps associate all the newly discovered subdomains to their respective IP addresses. One can use Burp Suite for automating the process.
• DNS Zone Transfer- We use the ‘nslookup’ command to find out the DNS servers in use. Using the ‘dig’ command after identification of all DNS servers and attempt the DNS zone transfer.
• Identification of Related External Sites- This is a vital step that can be accomplished using Burp Suite very easily to analyze the flow of traffic between the target web app and the external links.
• Analysis of HEAD and OPTION requests– They reveal the webserver software, versions, and some other beneficial data. One can easily use the ‘intercept on’ feature of Burp Suite to intercept these details.
• Details from Error Pages- Modification in the URL of the website to forcefully result in a 404 Not Found error fetches details of server and the running website version.
• Check the Source Code- It helps to understand the environment and other relevant information the web app is running on.
• Documentation of Data- Organizing all the gathered details in a presentable and understandable manner is the most pivotal step.

2. Execution Phase

This is the practical step where based on all the key details collected in the previous steps, the actual action is taken. One can make use of the vast range of tools based on the requirements.

The commonly used tools include Hydra, Burp Suite, SQLMap, Metasploit, John Ripper, W3af, Skipfish, Ratproxy, Watcher, and Wfuzz.

3. Post Execution Phase

Once the attacking phase is over, one must pen all the conclusions and vulnerabilities clearly and precisely.

Summarize all the successful exploits, and categorize them based on the severity of each one of them. It also suggests the steps to mitigate the risks and reverting to the target system’s original settings.

Conclusion

Web applications are publicly available and the most endangered; a proper plan to combat cyberattacks is mandatory for successfully running a business. These web apps carry sensitive information like personal user details, company information, payment or card details, etc., thus should be very well secured from the outside world. Performing a manual check or taking help from an external source like Astra Security is vital for the web app’s safe and secure functioning.