What Is Website Vulnerability

Vulnerabilities are weak spots in the system that hackers use to intentionally cause damage. These shortcomings that website vulnerability scanner can detect arise as a result of errors in system design and programming, from the effects of malware or scripting, and, of course due to the use of weak passwords.

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Not only websites, but also various programs and applications can be vulnerable to the penetration of cybercriminals into the system and cause leaks of the confidential information or its complete loss. Some weak spots pose a real danger to web resources and can seriously harm your website. Data Loss Prevention procedures let you monitor all possible weaknesses in your system using the website vulnerability scanner.

It is important to understand what kind of website vulnerabilities exist and how they can affect your projects. You can take care of the multistage protection of your site, but the more complicated it is, the higher the likelihood that one of the elements will have flaws that will adversely impact the security of the entire system.

According to research on the vulnerability of websites, it was revealed that the sites that used commercial CMS and Java / ASP.NET technologies turned out to be the most secure. The most susceptible to hacker attacks were those resources that are written in PHP and have their own engine.

The main goal of cybercriminals is to gain full control over the system, the existing vulnerabilities greatly simplify this task for the attackers. Therefore, do not save money on creating a safe resource. As a result, these investments will cost you less than the further elimination of the consequences of the hacker attacks.

Key Weak Spots Website Vulnerability Scanner Can Help Identify

The use of components with weaknesses such as libraries, frameworks, and other program modules open hackers a way to manage your resource. Due to applications and APIs that use components with common vulnerabilities, application security may be weakened, leading to all kinds of attacks. Then you can find out about the most basic weak spots that most often provide hackers with access to sensitive data.

If you don't know what libraries, applications and APIs your system has then it will be a great idea to use ImmuniWeb Discovery first. It will help you find all your website assets.

1. Injection

Injections are vulnerabilities that arise when user transfers unverified data to the interpreter for execution, that is, any Internet user can enter any code in the interpreter. The most common types of injections are SQL, XXE and LDAP injections. Using websites with SQL vulnerability, a hacker can penetrate the database, read secret information and even enter his values. Injections appear when they do not check if the information passed to the interpreter contains escape sequences and commands, for example, quotation marks in SQL.

2. Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) penetration

XSS injection does not pose a serious threat to the server, but it is much more dangerous for the website visitor. XSS works in user’s browser and allows to steal its information. The fraudster passes in one of the fields a special line with JS-code. The browser thinks this code sent the site and executes it. In this case, the code can be any. To protect against such attacks, all special characters must be escaped using the html special chars function or similar.

3. Incorrect configuration

To ensure security, the application must have properly configured servers, as well as a secure configuration planned and developed at the application level and framework. Website vulnerability scanner will detect such security misconfiguration, but you still need to constantly maintain security settings, as well as monitor the relevance of the software used. Many services are initially insecure.

4. Problems with authentication and session verification

That's so called Broken Authentication. To work with many applications, users must be authenticated. Often, authentication and session management is not performed correctly, as a result of which cybercriminals gain access to user accounts without password. Fraudsters can get session keys that identify users and use them for a while or constantly.

5. Problems with access control

Often, ordinary users gain access to sensitive information due to the carelessness of administrators. One of the most common examples is when the files are located in the root folder of the website, which allows one to gain unauthorized access even to protected .php files. Another frequently encountered problem with access control, which can be detected by website vulnerability scanner, is errors in the application code, which can provide access to secret information to unregistered users.

6. Unprotected confidential information

OWASP defines it as Sensitive Data Exposure. Many websites, APIs and web applications do not have the protection of user personal data, as a result of which it is actually publicly available. Keys, passwords, financial, medical and other confidential information can very easily be stolen or used in any other harmful way. Such important data should be protected, at least by https encryption.

Most applications cannot detect, prevent, and respond to manual or automated attacks. They do not have the basic functionality for this. To reliably protect the resource from attacks, it is not enough just to check the username and password. The service should identify and preclude attempts to enter the account incorrectly or other unauthorized actions. In addition, there should be the possibility of quick fixes to protect applications from new attacks.

7. Cross-Site Request Forgery or CSRF (XSRF) vulnerabilities

When attacking Cross-Site Request Forgery, a hacker could send some HTTP from the user's browser a request, for example, cookies, session files or any other data that is automatically included in an insecure web application. Thus, the fraudster can make requests from the user's browser. The application believes that they are correct and sent directly by the user. Due to this vulnerability, you can lose your account or, for example, become a source of spam or malware.

What Is Website Vulnerability Scanner

To identify weak spots, it is necessary to audit systems using specially designed website vulnerabilities scanner. The software checks the website for flaws and, based on the data analyzed, concludes that the site is generally protected.

Security audit using website vulnerability scanner includes a set of such activities:

• Search for elements with known vulnerabilities;
• Identification of weaknesses in server components and the web environment of the website;
• Scanning directories using search and hacking through the Google index;
• Attack by password guessing;
• Check for remote execution of arbitrary code;
• Attempts to circumvent the authentication system;
• Checking the ability to openly receive confidential data.
• Check for the presence of code injection;
• Identification of CSRF and XSS vulnerabilities of the site;
• Implementation of XML entities;
• Verification of all forms on the site: registration, login, search and others;
• Check for open redirects and redirecting to other web resources;
• Check the likelihood of file injections Remote or Local File Inclusion;
• Check for attacks of the Race Condition class - errors when designing multi-threaded systems and applications;
• Attempts to intercept privileged accounts or their sessions.

Website audit allows you to detect and anticipate its weak spots, as well as to see what attacks it may be exposed to. Based on the information received, you can develop a plan for protecting your web resource. Many website audit programs are published in OWASP Top Ten. Each website vulnerability scanner has a certain set of characteristics and checks for different types of weak points of online resources.

You can easily check your website for security vulnerabilities in minutes with ImmuniWeb Website Security Test. It makes GDPR & PCI DSS compliance test, HTTP headers check, CMS security scan.

Since hackers are constantly finding new ways to gain access to other people's sensitive data, an audit by means of website vulnerability scanner should be carried out regularly to highlight potential cyber security problems. Additionally, do not forget about preventive measures to exclude, or at least significantly lower possibility of cyber attacks and hacking, complying simple safety precautions.

Additional Resources

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