Even in this age of digitalization where everything is dependent on the internet, every small financial transaction, shopping, eating in restaurants, development, and implementation of software systems and sharing of information requires an active medium that is the internet. But even in this digital age hacking can't be stopped or ignored, to begin with. There is just too much malpractice among cybercriminals and hackers out there who want to sabotage the operations of the online websites and other entities by hacking them.
The end practice or purpose of hacking is either to extract the personal information of the corporate or the users that use the services of the website or the financial information if they can get their hands around it. Therefore the need for strengthening the security of these websites is imminent, thus the inclusion of website vulnerability scanners.
A website vulnerability scanner is a software program that would perform the automatic scanning of the website. This might include scanning the website for various structural vulnerabilities that can be assessed or exploited by hackers. While other types of scanning include the checking of network connection and the integrity of firewalls, Antivirus, or Antimalware systems that should be implemented or updated to have the latest security definitions. All of these are the responsibilities of the website vulnerability scanners.
Following is a list of most competitive website vulnerability scanners out there that you must be reaching out to if you need one right now;
- Grabber
It is a web vulnerability scanner that has a speed up processing and can come around various vulnerabilities within a website in a limited time-space. It performs the scans and tells where the vulnerability within a website exists. Various vulnerabilities such as SQL injection, Ajax testing, File inclusion, Backup file check, and various other vulnerabilities can be easily detected using the Grabber web application vulnerability testing. It might not be as fast as other scanners out there but it is really portable and very simple, to begin with. It might take a lot of time to scan the larger websites, which is why it must be used on small websites only.
- Vega
It is another free open source web vulnerability scanner and testing platform out there. Security testing of various web applications can be performed with the help of this tool. The tool itself is written in Java and can be used along with various operating systems such as OS X, Linux, and Windows systems. It can easily detect SQL injection attack, header injection, shell injection, cross-site scripting, and various other types of these attacks.
You can customize the working of the tool according to your own requirements such as you can change the preferences for optimum results such as the total number of path descendants, number of child paths of a node, including the depth and maximum number of requests per second.
- Wapiti
Wapiti is a web-based vulnerability scanner that allows you to interrogate the security of your web-based applications such as games, service-providing applications, and other various tools as such. It performs the black box testing technique for the sake of scanning the web pages and injecting them with data. It will literally inject the website with various payloads and record the response of the site security to this infiltration. It supports various attacks and can detect multiple vulnerabilities in a single run.
Cross-site scripting, file inclusion, command execution detection, backup file disclosure, and CRLF injection are some of the common web-based vulnerabilities that it can scan within a matter of minutes. It is a command-line application so it might not be easy to get into for the beginners but if you are already an expert then it will work elegantly for you. But in order to use this tool effectively, you would have to learn a lot of commands.
- W3af
It is a popular web vulnerability audit framework. This framework has to work for providing a better web application penetration testing platform. The tool is developed using Python, using this tool you would be able to identify more than 200 different kinds of web application vulnerability. This might include various types of vulnerability testing around SQL injection, cross-site scripting, and many other vulnerabilities as well.
It has a simple interface and is very easy to use given the graphical and console oriented interface. If you are using it with the graphical interface then it is highly unlikely that you will be facing any problems, to begin with. Only select the options and then click on the start button for the scanner to start working right away. If a website uses the authentication protocol to authenticate the users that are allowed to access the content on the website then you can also use the authentication modules for the sake of scanning the session protected pages.
- WebScarab
It is a java based security framework that can be used for analyzing the vulnerabilities that exist within the web-based applications using the HTTP or HTTPS protocols. The overall functionality of the tool can be extended with the inclusion of the additional plugins. The tool works as an intercepting proxy that means that you can review the requests as well as the responses that are coming to your browser and going directly to the server. You would also get to modify the response and requests even before these are received by your browser or server.
This tool is for the experts who know pretty much a lot about the HTTP protocol and can also write code, to begin with. But if you are a complete beginner then this is not for you. This tool can provide access to various features that can help the penetration testers to work closely with the web-based applications and try to undermine the security issues that continue to rise on top. It can easily extract the HTML and scripts of the page. The proxy can observe the traffic between your server and the browser.
- Skipfish
It is another great website vulnerability scanning software present on the internet, it can come across various vulnerabilities and threats that linger onto the different pages of the same website, and in the end, it will prepare a final report. The tool only utilizes a fraction of CPU, is written in C, and is extremely optimized for HTTP handling. The tool is programmed to handle almost 2000 requests per second without increasing the load/tension onto the CPU.
It claims to deliver less and less false positives and taking the work of finding the potential vulnerabilities rather seriously. The tool is available on a variety of different operating systems such as Windows, Mac OS, Linux, and many more to begin with.
- Ratproxy
It is an open-source web vulnerability scanning security audit tool that can be used for the sake of finding the security vulnerabilities within the web applications. It does support Linux, Mac OS, Windows, and various other operating systems out there to begin with. This tool can come around the problems of the users when using other proxy tools for security audits, it doesn’t interfere with their working and doesn’t affect the results at all.
If you want to work in the cyber-security landscape then it is important that you work on acquiring the cybersecurity certifications there are to bring about the best in your professional career.