Web VAPT (Pentesting) Services

Web Application VAPT

Exploiting website vulnerabilities is Number One problem in the world. This is solely because website are open to internet and hence can potentially expose sensitive data which interests the evil hackers. Thats the reason web security testing services are so important for organizations

Websites are typically vulnerable to code based or network based attacks. This enables hackers to take over and control system components such as routers, firewalls, switches and servers and in worst cases, the website code. Even though the website is plain simple and static html based, it needs detailed pen-testing (VAPT testing), and is often forgotten by IT management. Thus security testing of websites or web portals or web applications is highly required. It must be carried out by certified best penetration testing (pentest) companies who follow security testing methodologies based on OWASP Top-10 model.

Web App Pentesting Facts

Web application vulnerability assessment and penetration testing is one type of security testing. Vulnerability Assessment involves finding security holes i.e., vulnerabilities in the web application. Penetration Testing involves exploiting the found vulnerabilities to gain unauthorized access to the data or the system itself or making the data unavailable to access, or make changes to the data by compromising its integrity. Web VAPT (also called as Web Pentesting) helps find out weaknesses before they are exploited by hackers thus making web applications secure.

Web Application penetration testing, not only helps in detecting the vulnerabilities but also helps in prioritizing the identified vulnerabilities and threats, and possible ways to mitigate them. Valency Networks’s expertise, is in the hybrid concept of penetration testing. When searching for vulnerabilities in websites or web applications, manual pen testing is essential since automated penetration testing tools simply can’t find every flaw. It takes the skill and experience of an ethical hacker to identify complex authorization issues or business logic flaws.

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Web App VAPT
Web Application Security Testing Services

Exploiting website vulnerabilities is Number One problem in the world. This is solely because websites are open to internet and hence can potentially expose sensitive data which interests the evil hackers. That is one of the main reasons why web VAPT or security testing services are so important for organizations.

Even though the website is simple and static, html based, it needs detailed pen-testing (VAPT testing), which is often forgotten by IT management. Thus, security testing of websites or web portals or web applications is highly required. At Valency Networks it is carried out by certified and experienced penetration testers (pentesters, ethical hackers) who follow security testing methodologies based on latest OWASP Top-10 model

We perform web application penetration testing using world standard OWASP Top 10 model. While we perform testing using automated web security scanners, we prefer to perform manual security testing for the following attacks. More details at OWASP Top-10 model and also at Typical Web Application Security Vulnerabilities Pentesting

We perform web application penetration testing using world standard OWASP Top 10 model. While we perform testing using automated web security scanners, we prefer to perform manual security testing for the following attacks.

There are multiple and diverse automated tools available in the market. Automated tools reduce the time and effort required for testing. Also, with wide range of features that these tools offer, it becomes easy to find out the loopholes in the application. Few of pen-tester's favorite tools are mentioned below:

Burp-Suite: Out of all the tools, Burp suite tops the list. Developed by PortSwigger, it is one of the most popular proxy tools used to find out web-based vulnerabilities in the application. It has various tools that work seamlessly together to support the entire testing process, from initial mapping and analysis of an application's attack surface, to finding and exploiting security vulnerabilities.
It has feature named intruder, which actually is a request fuzzer. It allows us to run a series of different values through an input point. The output is observed for success/failure and content length, after running the values. A change of response code or content length of the response is observed when an anomaly occurs. Uses of intruder are as follows: Brute-force attacks on password, pin and other forms.

Metasploit: Metasploit is widely famous tool among security professionals. From identifying the weaknesses in the application and network and exploiting it to gain further access to the host. With extensive and advanced range of exploits for every vulnerability, it has become every pentesters paradise and for all the right reasons.
A user can configure an exploit module, pair with a payload, point at a target, and launch at the target system using various tools, libraries, user interfaces, and modules of Metasploit. Hundreds of exploits and several payload options are also available in its large and extensive database.

SQL-Map: It is an open-source tool. It automated most of the process of finding SQL injection weaknesses and exploiting it. We can use SQLmap to perform a wide range of Database attacks. This includes database fingerprinting, data extraction, and even taking over an entire database. We can also use it to bypass login forms and execute arbitrary commands on the underlying operating system.
In web applications, sqlmap aids in detecting SQL injection vulnerabilities and takes advantage of them. After detecting one or more SQL injections on the target host, there are a variety of options available to perform- an extensive back-end DBMS fingerprint, retrieving DBMS session user and database, enumerating users, password hashes, privileges, databases, dumping entire or user’s specific DBMS tables/columns, running your own SQL statement, reading specific files on the file system and a lot more.

Nikto: It is a scanner which is responsible for scanning web servers against potentially threatening vulnerabilities. According to Nikto’s official website, web servers are scanned for multiple items - 6700 dangerous files/programs, outdated versions of servers and version specific problems.
Nikto vulnerability scanner is an end-to-end scanner for the web server only, it scans the web server and checks against known vulnerabilities and lets you know about the potential security implications of the vulnerabilities that are identified by it. It performs Generic and server type specific checks. Also, any cookies received are captured and printed. Scans for configuration-related issues such as open index directories, SSL certificate scanning. Nikto aids in finding SQL injection, XSS, and other common vulnerabilities, identifying installed software (via headers, favicons, and files), guessing subdomains, reporting unusual headers, guessing credentials for authorization (including many default username/password combinations).

Manual Penetration Testing
All the pentesting details mentioned above are not everything. It takes years of experience and the subject matter expertise in penetration testing, which makes Valency Networks one of the top cyber security companies. With a wider set of provable credentials, our team is capable of performing ethical hacking attacks on a web application, and find security vulnerabilities. This makes us the most preferred vendor or Partner Company in cyber security space. The thumb rule that real life hackers follow, is not to use automated tools, but to do the hacking manually. This is because it is not entirely possible for tools and scripts to find all vulnerabilities. There are some vulnerabilities which can be identified by manual scan only.

Penetration testers can perform better attacks on application, based on their skills and knowledge of system. Just like social engineering can be done by humans only, the same applies to website attacks such as SQL Injection, Cross site scripting (XSS) and cross site request forgery (CSRF). Manual checking also covers design, business logic as well as code verification.

Web servers and the application code running on those as a simple website or web portal, are vulnerable to various attacks. In one type of attack, the hacker can simply deface the pages, while in other serious types, the attacker can potentially steal data and disrupt website operations.

We can assure you that all of our customers come to us with the same question. But once we perform web vapt for them, and once they see the detailed pentesting report, they are more than convinced. This is because Valency Networks provide utmost details of vulnerabilities found and their fixation. This comes purely from the expertise and knowledge base, which helps our customers think of us as best VAPT vendors.
Further based on our experience, web security testing is especially important in case of e-commerce-based portals, wherein the entire business relies on website and its data contents. In case of recent trend, the websites cater to mobile based applications which demands for an end-to-end testing for total app security. It’s important to understand that merely having firewalls and Layer-7 devices are not enough because those cannot detect code level vulnerabilities, and hence a detailed website VAPT along with code security review is highly recommended.

Web security ultimately means implementing measures and strategies to keep websites secure from malicious attackers. The one way to achieve the security is by timely scanning the websites while they are in development stage and later when they are up and running. This helps capturing both coding flaws in the software code and run time errors by keeping it guarded.

Web has proved to become hacker's favorite place to exploit the innocent. There has been rise in the number of web application attack lately. Web application attack is nothing but exploiting the unattended and unpatched vulnerabilities in an application to either steal the data, alter the data or make the data or website unavailable to the people in need. Such attacks are proven to be really costly for the businesses and often they were shut completely because of the inability to contain such incidents. Listed below are some popular attacks down below that are more deadly.

Cross Site Scripting
It is all about injecting specially crafted payloads in the URL or unsensitized input fields to steal user's session and gain their privileges to cause further damage. This occurs anywhere a web application uses input from a user within the output it generates without validating or encoding it as the flaws allowing these attacks to succeed are quite widespread. The end user’s browser will execute the script as it does not know that the script should not be trusted thinking that it came from a trusted source. Cookies, session tokens, or other sensitive information retained by the browser and used with that site can be accessed by malicious scripts. These scripts are able to rewrite the content of the HTML page.
XSS enables an attacker to hijack the user’s session and take over the account. Also, it aids in getting the legitimate user privileges (reading data, capturing user credentials etc). Further it can cause virtual defacement of the web site and/or injecting trojan functionality into the web site. This can lead to gaining access to the user’s geolocation, webcam, microphone, and specific files from the user’s file system. XSS can also be used in conjunction with other types of attacks like Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF).

More Info: SQL Injection Vulnerabilities
Since database has its own language, this attack makes use of carefully crafted SQL injection queries to interact with backend database and fetch data from it. The data that is normally not retrievable including data belonging to other users, or any other data that the application itself is able to access, can be viewed by the attacker after performing SQL Injection attack. This vulnerability can give access to source code from files on the database server. The SQL injection attack can be escalated to compromise the underlying server or other back-end infrastructure, or perform a denial-of-service attack. SQL injection aids attackers in spoofing identity, tampering with existing data, causing repudiation issues such as voiding transactions or changing balances, allowing the complete disclosure of all data on the system, destroying the data or making it otherwise unavailable, and gaining admin rights to the database server.

Denial of Service/Distributed Denial of Service:
This attack attempts to overwhelm the target with constant requests either from one source or from different sources. The end goal is to make target slow or unavailable to people using it. DoS uses a single connection, while a DDoS attack uses many sources of attack traffic. The server crashes as it is flooded with more Transmission Control Protocol/User Datagram Protocol (TCP/UDP) packets than it can process. This may lead to data corruption, and resources being misdirected or even exhausted to the point of paralyzing the system.

Cross Site Request Forgery: CSRF is tricking a user into submitting requests to a Web application. Web application being oblivious of the scenario executes the request thinking it came from the legitimate user. In this attack, unwanted actions on a web application in which they’re currently authenticated, are forced on the end user. With the aid of social engineering (such as sending a link via email or chat), an attacker tries to trick the users of a web application into executing attacker's intended actions. This attack may lead to the user to performing state changing requests like transferring funds, changing their email address, and so forth, if the victim has normal user privileges. The entire web application can be compromised if the victim has an administrative account. This may lead to inadvertent client or server data leakage, change of session state, or manipulation of an end user's account. More Info : CSRF (Cross Site Request Forging) Vulnerability

Server Site Request Forgery: SSRF leads to disclosure of sensitive information from the back-end server of the application. Malicious packets are sent to any Internet-facing web server by attackers and this webserver sends packets to the backend server running on the internal network on behalf of the attacker. Applications having the facility to feed the URL for fetching data from the respective servers and applications having two or more servers from different hosts communicating with each other for information sharing, are vulnerable to SSRF. SSRF may enable an attacker to perform arbitrary command execution. The functionality of the server to read or update internal resources is abused by the attacker. This attack enables an attacker to read server configuration such as AWS metadata, connect to internal services like HTTP-enabled databases or perform POST requests towards internal services that are not intended to be exposed, by carefully selecting the URLs. Also, they can bypass IP whitelisting and host-based authentication services, perform port scans on the internal network that the server is connected to, view status pages and interact with APIs as the web server, and retrieve sensitive information such as the IP address of a web server running behind a reverse proxy.

Remote Code Execution (RCE): In Remote code execution an attacker can remotely execute commands on someone else’s computing device. Remote code executions (RCEs) can happen regardless of the device’s geographic location and usually occur due to malicious malware downloaded by the host. The attacker scans computers across the internet seeking known vulnerabilities that may support a successful attack or exploit zero-day software vulnerabilities to gain deeper access to a machine, network or web application. RCE enables the attackers to exfiltrate data, divert funds, perform detailed surveillance, edit or destroy important files, steal confidential data, perform DDoS attacks, compromise the entire system and disrupt service. RCE could also lead to privilege escalation, network pivoting, crypto mining and ransomware.

Confidentiality, Authentication, Validation, Sanitization and insecure communication are the primary security issues that all web services need to look into before making their products/services live.
Confidentiality:Includes using encryption mechanism to keep sensitive data secure. This is strongly recommended for applications having payment services as the data to be transmitted are critical data that can be misused by hackers. Also, for the purpose of customer satisfaction and privacy, confidentially is a must.
Authentication:Authentication bypass is a prevalent attack these days by simply implementing brute force attacks and SQL injection attacks. Therefore, secure your login and authentication mechanisms are very essential.
Validation & Sanitization: Many applications perform Validation & Sanitization only on the client side and forget to consider doing the same on their server-side which is equivalent to using a head umbrella during heavy rains.
Insecure Communication:While dealing with sensitive data such as customer details, payment card details, social security numbers, emails, and more every SysAdmin must ensure their application is using a secure mode of communication.

More information can be found here: Typical Web Application Security Vulnerabilities Pentesting

Web server in simplest terms is a physical machine or a virtual machine that hosts a website which is then accessed by user over World Wide Web. Web server security is tightening the measures taken to protect a web server along with the database it is connected to, and the network it is placed in. Many servers come with unnecessary default and sample files, including applications, configuration files, scripts, and web pages. They may also have unnecessary services enabled, such as content management and remote administration functionality. Such misconfigurations are easily exploited by hackers to gain access of the web server.

• Hardening of server: :

  
  It simply means deploying recommended protection mechanism to boost your server's security.



• Patching of server software:

  
  Patching and updating software is an extremely important step if you do not want attackers taking advantage of loopholes. Always keep an eye for vendor approved patches and deploy them diligently.



• Logging and Monitoring:

  
  The audit logs become the most crucial piece of evidence when your server starts behaving abnormally. Hence, always monitor the logs periodically for any traces of wrongdoings.



• HTTP Headers:

  
  Hide server info such as name and version from the headers.



• User Access:

  
  Restrict access to server by creating user groups.

With growing number and varieties of applications in the market, attackers have also become smart and are continuously finding brand new ways of exploiting the applications for their benefit. Hence, it becomes absolutely necessary to protect the application and implement security strategies that will secure the application from inside out.

With the application security assessment it becomes easy to test the application architecture, software code for underlying weaknesses and fix those before anyone else can take advantage of it.

Timely assessment of application can also help us make the application comply with current and applicable compliance standards so as to avoid any legal disputes later.

Web servers and the application code running on those as a simple website or web portal, are vulnerable to various attacks. In one type of attack, the hacker can simply deface the pages, while in other serious types, the attacker can potentially steal data and disrupt website operations.

Web security testing is especially important in case of e-commerce based portals, wherein the entire business relies on website and its data contents. In case of recent trend the websites cater to mobile based applications which demands for an end to end testing for total app security. Its important to understand that merely having firewalls and Layer-7 devices are not enough because those cannot detect code level vulnerabilities, and hence a detailed website VAPT along with code security review is highly recommended.