Web Pentesting Services (Web VAPT)
Web Application VAPT Benefits
Web Security testing is a continuous improvement process to get benefited in terms of increasing ROI (Returns on Investment). Benefits of a pen-test are short term as well as long term. Our experienced VAPT services help companies meet their compliance requirements faster.
The variety of security flaws we find in your web application are far more than any standard tools or primitive ways of Pentesting – our expertise. We are one of the best web security testing services companies in India. Since we are one of the top VAPT vendors with customer all over the world, we carry a responsibility to do our job right. Our report gives you a detailed picture of what need to be improved in your web application inside out, from cyber security standpoint.
Secure website from hackers
Website/Application VAPT is a security testing process to address the security flaws within your product. One of the top and the important benefit is to secure the website from the hackers. Web Penetration testing keeps the attackers away from accessing and stealing the sensitive information through numerous injection attacks, malwares and much more. Performing VAPT will not only protect from sensitive data leakage but also saves company reputation and brand.
Prevent information stealing
The security gaps and misconfigurations within your Website/Application may lead to sensitive information disclosure to the hackers. For example, this sensitive information could be of a patient whose medical history gets revealed over the internet or credit card details of a customer shopping on an e-commerce website. To prevent hackers from stealing this information, it is advised to perform Vulnerability Assessment and Penetration Testing on a regular basis.
Prevent monetary loss
Data breach can lead to monetary loss in numerous ways and impact the company badly. When your sensitive information is disclosed, hackers may ask for money in the form of ransomware. Due to which, company will not only lose money, but also its reputation and credibility. This will eventually lead to losing customers and can lead to financial loss. It may also cost money to the company if the clients decide to file a legal case against it for leaking the personal data. All this can be prevented if the application goes through vulnerability assessment and penetration testing before it gets released. In VAPT, all security loops holes are tested and made sure is secure from any external or internal attacks. Hence, it’s better to invest in security than to fall prey to hackers.
Prevent reputational loss
Providing due diligence and compliance to your industry regulators, customers and shareholders. Non-compliance can lead to your organization losing business, receiving heavy fines, gathering bad PR or ultimately failing. VAPT can aid in avoiding loss of consumer confidence and business reputation.
Induce confidence in customer
The companies that are honest about their security strategies are valued by customers, partners, and stakeholders. Conducting regular VAPT as part of a comprehensive security strategy enhances the credibility of a company with their customers since your company is taking their security seriously.
Higher long-term profits
Data breaches can cost companies a lot of money, from the team that remediates it to the loss of customers. It can also lead to fines and damages if it results in legal action. VAPT will save you money in the long term by letting you take precautions to avoid data breaches.
Increased ROI (Return on Investment)
It is said that the value of an asset is determined by the value of data being hosted by it. More critical the data, more critical the asset. To ensure safety of the data, it is important to secure the asset first. This can be done by calculating the risks and its impact if they were exploited. Vulnerability Assessment does just the same. It analyses the asset be it a network asset such as firewall or a simple asset such as desktop for underlying risks and fixes it before an attacker can reach to them.
Timely assessment of vulnerabilities can help an organization decide which vulnerabilities to prioritize first based on the harm they can cause to a system. A good amount of investment in quality tools and skilled manpower now can tremendously benefit an organization in a long run.
This can also benefit an organization in gaining new customers and clients. VAPT builds a certain level of confidence among the organization due to a good sense and understanding of how far an organization is when it comes to security.
Website Penetration Testing (VAPT) Benefits
Secure website from hackers
Prevent information stealing
Prevent monetory loss
Prevent reputational loss
Induce confidence in customer
Higher long term profits
Increased ROI
What Happens If You Dont Perform Web Pentesting?
What happens when you get hacked, it totally depends on the hacker’s intentions. Following are few possibilities of what damages can a hacker cause:
• Monitory loss
• Reputational loss
• Data breach
• Data tampering
• Selling of confidential data to competitors
• Privacy gets compromised
• Abuse of social security number
• Multiple free purchases in case of ecommerce sites
• Stealing of money and open credit card and bank accounts in your name
Exploiting website vulnerabilities is one of the boggiest problems in the world. This is mainly because website is open to internet and hence can potentially expose sensitive data which interests the evil hackers. That's the reason web security testing services are so important for organizations.Read on Web Application Security Pentesting Methodologies (Web VAPT Methodologies)
Outcome Of Web Application VAPT
Below are few examples of what companies gain as an outcome of our VAPT services. Valency Networks imparted technical knowledge into the minds of customers' technical teams, while performing the security audit of their web applications. This side benefit is intangible but helps organizations in the long run, to leverage the experience and expertise of the VAPT technical team.
• An organization in India realized that their operational expenses on cyber security reduced by 40% due to regular VAPT and fixations.
• A bank in gulf country figured out that a frequent VAPT can help reduce the cost per data leakage.
• An IT company in UK felt quick readiness to their GDPR compliance due to the security holes found in network Pentesting and their fixations.
• A pharma company in India realized that their data was leaked in the past, based on the logs corroborated during network vulnerability assessment.
Web Pentesting Case Studies
Case Study 1: Insurance Company | Location: UK
Valency Networks performed Web application Vulnerability Assessment and Penetration Testing for a Medical Insurance Application, during which Two critical issues were identified-
• Authorization of users were not being handled efficiently. This resulted into non-admin user getting access to an Admin user’s account simply by using the after-login URL of the admin account.
• Database connection string was accessible over internet.
After reporting the found issues to the customer, it was disclosed that their medical insurance database was stolen. Through the VAPT conducted, it identified that the medical insurance data was breached through the loopholes of the application. On further investigation, we found out that the incident was caused by a past employee who stole the names and phone numbers of everyone and sold that data to a matrimonial website to gain money. As a side effect of this incident, everyone who’s details were sold, started getting calls for marriage proposals.
VAPT Benefits to Insurance Company
Although the Insurance company couldn’t stop the matrimonial calls that their customers and employees were receiving, they did fix the root cause of this issue by fixing the 2 Critical vulnerabilities reported during the Web VAPT.
Case Study 2: Hospital | Location: India
A hospital in India had come for VAPT of their Xray machine which had its own computer terminal that stored digital images of Xray for analytics purpose. Couple months before the VAPT started, digitalized Xray images were stolen by a person to make money. Because of the incident the Hospital decided to get the computer terminal tested for Security loopholes. During the Security testing, the Xray software was highly vulnerable to critical attacks. >One such attack was SQL injection. Simple SQL injection payloads were being processed by the server thus disclosing sensitive information. It was later concluded that due to insecure software the data breach incident had taken place.
VAPT Benefits to Healthcare Hospitals
To avoid such incidents, we suggest our customers to get Vulnerability Assessment & Penetration Testing done on a periodic basis. Even if major changes are not made within the application coding, its important to get VAPT done as attacks and hacking techniques are changing on a day-to-day basis. The need to keep your critical applications secure from latest attacks, it’s your responsibility to get your application tested for security. And with our expertise we take responsibility to ensure your application is tested for security loopholes.
Case Study 3: Core banking application | Location: India
We conducted a Vulnerability Assessment and Penetration Testing for a Core Banking application and found out that there were a number of vulnerabilities in the application as “Secure by Design” approach was not adopted. The development teams ignored session management and access control best practices, which lead to numerous security vulnerabilities. Access to confidential information was possible due to the design flaws in identity and access management for certificate generation. These security flaws enabled attackers to gain access to legitimate user accounts and obtain unauthorized access to password-protected resources. The customers demanded security of their data. It took months to close the vulnerabilities in the core banking application. This resulted in the company losing their customers, ultimately impacting the business of banking application.
VAPT Benefits to Banking Industry
The cause of security flaws was identified only after conducting vulnerability assessment and penetration testing. Hence it is advised to conduct VAPT regularly.
Case Study 4: Pharma Logistics Web Application | Location: USA, India
A Vulnerability Assessment and Penetration Testing was conducted for Pharma Logistics Web Application. It was discovered that their database had been stolen by a hacker and was being sold on dark web. Other companies were able to see inventory of their competitors. Consequently, resulting into over-inventory or scarcity. The web application had some serious security bugs. The code review was not performed, which led to more security bugs. The session management was missing, the session timing was very long, and anyone getting hands on after login URL would get complete access of the active session. It was also observed that Cross site scripting attack was easily possible as input sanitization was not performed accurately. All these issues lead to session hijacking, account take over, virtual defacement of the website, injection of trojan functionality and so on.
VAPT Benefits to Pharmaceutical Company
To avoid all these impacts of vulnerabilities, it is advised to conduct VAPT on a regular basis. This would enable the developers to fix the root cause of the vulnerabilities and avoid their impacts in the future.
Case Study 5: Business & Analytics Application | Location: USA, India
A vulnerability assessment and penetration testing were performed on an AI based business analytics application. It was one of the interesting projects we had worked on. There were multiple applications that were part of our testing scope, of which some where open to internet while others were intranet applications. For the intranet applications we had taken remote access of their machine to perform our testing. Being internal applications, there where multiple functional issues within the applications. Along with it, we observed that insecure design had been implemented for authorization or user roles which lead to vertical and horizontal privilege escalation. User input validation was also found to be missing which resulted into cross-site scripting and command injection attacks.
VAPT Benefits to Intranet Applications
Although the application may not be exposed to internet, it's important to secure intranet applications as well, as insider threats are increasing lately. Performing Vulnerability assessment & pentesting is not just to protect from external attacks but to also from insider/ internal attacks.
Case Study 6: A Start-up Company | Location: India
Once, after an application pentesting was performed, customer came back for the retest after fixing all issues that were reported. During the retest we found that out of 12 vulnerabilities reported, one vulnerability was not fixed, which was cross-site scripting. We got on a call with their dev team and asked the fixation method they implemented. They explained us that they implemented a header named CSP to mitigate the XSS issue. Our team understood where the fixation went wrong and provided technical support by suggesting them to implement validation and sanitization in the user input fields on both client and server side. Customer team understood the fixation part this time and came back fixing the issue.
VAPT Benefits for start-ups
The issues reported during a VAPT may be critical or low, but knowing the right fixation methodology and implementing them correctly is important. Just knowing the vulnerabilities within an application is not going to fix it, implementing the fixes and checking if they have been implemented correctly is the right way to do it.
Case Study 7: E-Commerce Application | Location: India
An E-commerce application was given to perform Vulnerability Assessment and Penetration Testing. The critical part of it was the payment gateway. While testing the payment gateway part of the application, it was found that the server was not validating the amount that was being charged. Due to this flaw, a user was able to order 1000/- product and pay nothing for it, by simply fooling the server that the payment has been made. This was highly critical as it hampers the applications business logic. Along with the VAPT, PCIDSS compliance checks were also performed as they were storing and dealing with credit card details. Certain PCIDSS checks were also not found to be implemented within the application. On reporting the vulnerabilities to the customer, they were utterly shocked and were glad that they performed the security testing before going live.
VAPT Benefits for E-commerce application
Performing VAPT for critical application is very essential especially when dealing with sensitive information. One can only imagine the loss the company would have faced if they had skipped the VAPT phase.
Case Study 8: Medical Industry | Location: India
A very interesting application was given for testing. The application was integrated with a tool kit which was used for testing where a person was COVID positive or negative. The application generated the report of the particular user who was logged into the application and used the tool kit. However, during the pentesting it was found that a user was able to view other users reports as well. On further testing the application it was found that session was not being managed efficiently due to which session hijacking and UAPL was also possible. As we went deep into testing the more loopholes were found that were exploitable.
This gave the customer clarity on the security aspect of their application. Although the purpose of the application was great, its security was poor and could have led to data beaches, data privacy incidents which would have caused the company reputational loss, monetary loss, etc.
VAPT Benefits for New Technological Applications
No matter how great the purpose of an application would be, if it's not tested to be made secure, it can lead to huge loss.
Refere to more Web Pentesting Case Studies
