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Introduction to Acunetix Web Vulnerability Scanner
Introduction to Acunetix Web Vulnerability Scanner
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1. Introduction to Acunetix Web
Vulnerability Scanner
1.1
Why You Need To Secure Your Web Applications
Website security is possibly today's most overlooked aspect of securing the
enterprise and should be a priority in any organization.
Increasingly, hackers are concentrating their efforts on web-based
applications to obtain access and to misuse sensitive data such as customer
details, credit card numbers and proprietary corporate data.
Hackers already have a wide repertoire of attacks that they regularly launch
against organizations including SQL Injection, Cross Site Scripting, Directory
Traversal
Attacks, Parameter Manipulation
(e.g., URL, Cookie, HTTP
headers, HTML Forms),
Authentication
Attacks, Directory Enumeration and
other exploits. Moreover, the hacker
community is very close-knit; newly
discovered web application intrusions are posted on a number of forums and
websites known only
to members of that exclusive group. Postings are
updated daily and are used to propagate and facilitate further hacking.
Web applications – shopping carts, forms, login pages, dynamic content, and
other bespoke applications –
are designed to allow your website visitors to
retrieve and submit dynamic content including varying levels of personal and
sensitive data.
If these web applications are not secure, then your entire database
of
sensitive information is at serious risk. A Gartner Group study reveals that
75% of cyber attacks are done at the web application level.
Why does this happen?
Websites and related web applications must be available 24 hours a
day, 7 days a week
to provide the required service to customers,
employees, suppliers and other stakeholders.
Firewalls
and SSL
provide no protection against web application
hacking, simply because access to the website has to be made
public.
Web applications often have direct access to backend data such as
customer databases and, hence, control valuable data and are much
more difficult to secure.
Most web applications are custom-made and, therefore, involve a
lesser degree of testing than off-the-shelf software. Consequently,
custom applications are more susceptible to attack.
Various high-profile hacking attacks have proven that web application
security remains the most critical. If your web applications are compromised,
hackers will have complete access to your backend data even though your
firewall is
configured correctly and your operating system and applications
are patched repeatedly.
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