Web Application Security Testing: Key Steps, Methods, and Tools

Quick Summary: Web apps are widespread today and they are also the key target of cyber attackers. Protecting them requires a comprehensive web application security strategy involving thorough testing for vulnerabilities. This article will shed light on web app security testing, describing its importance, types, and steps for implementation. Keep reading to know everything.

Data breaches are increasing, but many companies still take web application security for granted. They focus more on implementing additional security measures and pay little or no attention to proactive measures.

According to IBM’s 2025 threat intelligence report, one-fourth of cyberattacks exploit common vulnerabilities in public-facing applications, indicating a significant risk for companies using web apps. It’s a wake-up call, isn’t it?

Regular web application security testing empowers you to protect your application and prevent a hacker’s attempt to steal data. It offers insights into your web app’s attack surface to let you take stronger measures to defend it.

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What is Web Application Security Testing?

Web application security testing (WAST) is a set of all actions that you take to identify, prioritize, and remediate vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities are common security weaknesses, misconfigurations, or loopholes that a hacker can utilize to gain unauthorized access to your web app’s resources or steal sensitive data.

By testing your web applications’ security, you try to emulate that scenario and find the gaps that a hacker could potentially exploit. In short, web app security testing helps you evaluate your application’s security controls and measures to discover any loopholes.

Typically, WAST aims to inspect the input and output features, server configurations, authentication/authorization mechanisms, error handling, and other crucial components of your web app.

Security testing allows you to discover critical vulnerabilities mentioned below to protect against cyberattacks.

• Injection Flaws
• Broken Authentication
• Cryptographic failures
• Security Misconfiguration
• Outdated Components
• Insecure Deserialization
• Cross-Site Scripting
• Local File Inclusion
• Session Hijacking

Why Does Web Application Security Testing Matter?

You may wonder - we have deployed WAF (Web Application Firewall), have a response plan, and implemented robust security controls, yet why do we need security testing for web applications?

Now consider Microsoft, a huge tech giant with lots of resources and taking the strongest measures, yet the company suffered a data breach that exposed over 250 million records some years ago.

This shows that even if you have abundant resources, you may fall prey to cyberattacks. This is because hackers are continuously updating their tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs).

In this kind of situation, the only reliable way to combat these threats is by following a proactive approach, and web application security testing does the same. You can find vulnerabilities and fix them before a hacker exploits them.

Therefore, web application security assessment is vital for the following reasons:

• It enables you to safeguard your data and thwart potential cyberattacks by eradicating hidden loopholes that hackers may misuse.
• By performing security testing, C-suite executives can understand the potential business impact of vulnerabilities and take the right steps to mitigate the risk.
• The testing is also crucial from a compliance perspective, as it helps you understand gaps. By taking the right measures, you can ensure compliance with regulations like GDPR, PCI DSS, SOC2, and more.
• Regular security testing enables you to safeguard your customers’ data and maintain their trust as well as your brand reputation.

Steps to Perform Web Application Security Testing

A thorough security assessment is crucial to identifying hidden vulnerabilities and protecting web apps against cyber threats. But how to test web applications security? How does the process work? The following are all the steps you need to follow to test web apps.

1. Determine the Scope: Decide the goals of security testing. It can be either evaluating the overall security posture or identifying specific vulnerabilities. Also, you can identify the parameters of the assessment.

2. Choose a Methodology: After defining the scope, consider what methodology you are to use to test the web app. For example, you can choose between SAST, DAST, and IAST methodologies. When it comes to dynamic testing, DAST is the right option and SAST is useful for thorough code analysis. You can also choose a combination of these methods as per requirement.

3. Create a Representative Test Environment: This environment ought to be identical to the one used in production. It enables you to carry out evaluations without interfering with actual users. Therefore, you have to ensure that your test data is varied and covers both common user scenarios and probable edge cases.

4. Perform Security Test: This involves scanning your web application for vulnerabilities using the right tools and methodology. These tests involve:

• Version check: Identifies if the web app is up-to-date or if there are any outdated components.
• Auditing permissions: This test involves inspecting the implementation of user permissions and roles.
• Assess security protocols: Evaluate security measures like firewalls, SSL protocols, multi-factor authentication, and other mechanisms.
• Code analysis: Analyze code and perform dynamic security testing for runtime vulnerabilities.
• Assess database security: Evaluate the database to check security against attacks like SQL injection.
• Configuration checks: This test assesses the configuration of your web application and network.
• Business logic testing: It checks for flaws in your application’s design and implementation.
• Input validation testing: It tests your web application for proper input validation and checks for any vulnerable parts.
• Session management and authentication review: It tests the authentication and session management mechanisms to check resilience against cyber threats.
• Configuration checks: Assess application configurations to check they are proper.
• Authorization verification: Checks authorization procedure to verify a web application’s ability to prevent unauthorized access.

5. Prioritize and Analyze the Results: Once vulnerabilities are detected, they must be prioritized according to their potential impact and severity. You must follow industry standards like CVSS – a common vulnerability scoring system to score and prioritize vulnerabilities.

6. Create a Detailed Report: A detailed test report not only provides a clear and concise executive summary, but also highlights vulnerabilities found, possible consequences, compliance status, and suggested corrective actions. Such a report will help stakeholders make the right decisions and promptly fix critical vulnerabilities to avoid cyber risks.

What are the Different Techniques Used in Web Application Security Testing?

There are multiple techniques used in web application security assessment to discover vulnerabilities. These techniques evaluate diverse aspects of your web application.

• Vulnerability Scanning: It involves automated scanners or tools to identify common vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and outdated components. It helps discover vulnerabilities like OWASP Top 10 and CWE Top 25. It also provides remediation advice.
• Pen Testing: This technique of security testing for web applications involves simulating real-world attacks to discover vulnerabilities. It goes an extra step than vulnerability scanning by exploiting them to discover the potential risk.
• Fuzzing: This is another technique for web application security testing that checks application behavior by sending random, unexpected, or invalid inputs to identify security flaws.
• Testing Business Logic: It involves evaluating the business logic of an application and identifying any flaws. Business logic testing helps discover implementation and design flaws that might result in unauthorized access. It is an essential testing that helps discover common business logic vulnerabilities.
• Code Evaluation: In this technique, the source code of a web application is evaluated to check for flaws and errors that a hacker might exploit.
• API Testing: A comprehensive web app security testing also requires the assessment of APIs they depend on.

What Methodologies are Used in Web Application Security Testing?

Choosing the right method for web app security testing is crucial to performing a comprehensive analysis. There are five methods commonly used in testing web apps for security, as given below.

SAST (Static Application Security Testing)

SAST focuses on analyzing the source code or bytecode of a web-based application. It works by integrating SAST tools into IDEs that check source code in real-time and provide alerts when there are security-specific errors.

SAST helps in the early identification and remediation of vulnerabilities even before the application is built and deployed. So, it reduces the chances of potential cyber risks. However, it generates more false positives, which means it often fails to detect vulnerabilities accurately.

DAST (Dynamic Application Security Testing)

As the name suggests, DAST is a method where web applications are tested at runtime, when the code is executed. This may be in production or during the staging. Mostly, DAST is used in the early phase of SDLC to shift-left security testing.

A DAST tool can discover vulnerabilities that occur at runtime and generate lower false positives than SAST. It simulates external attacks on a web app from the frontend and checks them against common vulnerabilities such as OWASP top 10, CWE 25, and more.

IAST (Interactive Application Security Testing)

IAST combines the aspects of both SAST and DAST by evaluating application code after the build process and while the app is running. It relies on the instrumentation of code to directly monitor the source code during the execution of the application.

So, it checks the code at runtime and if there is any error in a line, it provides alerts in real time. It uses sensors and agents to monitor the code and detect vulnerabilities. By leveraging IAST tools, you can discover a wide range of vulnerabilities.

OAST (Out-of-Band Application Security Testing)

OAST is an advanced dynamic testing method that overcomes the limitations of DAST. It works by leveraging external servers to evaluate applications and discover blind vulnerabilities that traditional dynamic testing fails to detect.

The advantage of the out-of-band application security testing method is it generates almost no false positives and helps uncover hidden vulnerabilities by analyzing applications at a deeper level.

SCA (Software Composition Analysis)

SCA tests the third-party and open-source components used with your web application. Often, insecure open source or third-party components lead to security holes that hackers can exploit. This may cause supply chain attacks.

SCA tools analyze your application, discover third-party or open-source components, and check them for common security flaws. These tools also prioritize vulnerabilities and offer remediation guidance.

Penetration Testing (Pen Testing)

Penetration testing, often known as pentesting, is a security testing method that simulates actual attacks on a network or application to find potential security flaws and evaluate how well an organization's security controls work.

Usually carried out by skilled security experts, penetration testing uses both automated and human methods to find and exploit vulnerabilities. Companies widely use penetration testing in cybersecurity to identify more complex vulnerabilities and secure their data.

Runtime Application Self-Protection (RASP)

Runtime Application Self-Protection, or RASP, continuously scans a web application's runtime environment for security vulnerabilities in order to detect threats or flaws and prevent them.

RASP can find vulnerabilities in an application's configuration that are hidden from view until it is executed, even if they may not be in the source code. It is your web application's last line of defense against potential security threats.

Best Practices for Effective Web Application Security Testing

How can you make your web app testing more effective and ensure a robust cybersecurity posture? The following best practices provide a roadmap to make it more effective and reap the benefits of WAST.

Test Beyond OWASP Top 10

OWASP is a community-driven initiative that provides information, guidance, and resources for cybersecurity. It also provides a list of the most critical security vulnerabilities in web applications known as OWASP top ten. Analyzing your application for OWASP risks can help you test it for the most common vulnerabilities and loopholes. However, you should test for other vulnerabilities like business logic flaws, information exposure, insecure APIs, etc.

Shift-Left Testing

It is best to integrate WAST in the early phase of your SDLC instead of considering it an afterthought. This is known as shift-left security testing, which focuses on performing vulnerability assessments during the development and not just at the time of deployment. There are security testing tools that can be integrated into CI/CD pipelines to perform automated tests as applications are built.

Regular Testing

As cyberthreats are growing at an unprecedented pace, regular security testing is crucial to protect your web app and data. Automated vulnerability scanning helps regularly scan your web applications and uncover vulnerabilities even in production to always stay ahead of hackers. This will enable you to discover hidden loopholes in your application before a hacker finds and exploits it.

Combined Approach

Combine automated vulnerability scanning with pen testing to leverage a comprehensive approach to identify and address vulnerabilities. While automated scanning helps detect common vulnerabilities, pen testing simulates real-world attacks to check the exploitability of those vulnerabilities. Consequently, you get deeper insights, which leads to improved risk management and a stronger security posture.

Prioritize Remediation

Automated vulnerability scanning results in constant alerts that may create confusion, and some critical vulnerabilities might be missed. This will enable the developers to focus on the most critical risks first and fix them before they get exploited.

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Top Tools for Testing Web Application Security

You need the right tool to thoroughly evaluate your web app and uncover hidden vulnerabilities. The following tools are widely used by cybersecurity professionals and developers to test and secure web apps.

• ZeroThreat
• ZAP (Zed Attack Proxy)
• Burp Suite
• Nikto
• Acunetix
• W3af
• Wfuzz
• OpenVAS

ZeroThreat: Your Go-to Solution for WAST

Web application security testing – WAST is not optional; it is an essential strategy to boost cybersecurity. It enables you to identify and remediate vulnerabilities that eventually reduce the chances of cyberattacks. This helps you keep ahead of hackers who use clever techniques to discover weaknesses in your app and exploit them for their malicious objectives.

However, when it comes to security testing, quality matters a lot, and you should always prefer a tool that checks all the boxes for quality. That’s when ZeroThreat – the best web app security testing tool, comes into the picture. As a next-gen security testing tool, ZeroThreat empowers your security teams or developers to perform continuous automated testing even within SDLC and detect known and complex vulnerabilities, including business logic flaws.

It’s a developer-friendly and easy tool that requires no configuration to perform a test. Plus, the speed is high, 5X faster than other tools, and it detects vulnerabilities with 98.9% accuracy with near-zero false positives. Want to know more? Contact our experts to find out more about ZeroThreat!