Securing your IT assets against blackhat hackers is like securing your home against burglars. You must choose the right tools for the job. For example, if you live in a 10-floor apartment block, it makes no sense to install a fence around the perimeter. If you have a huge mansion, a single burglar alarm at the main door will not suffice.
When you choose IT security tools, you need to look at what assets are most exposed. You also need to make sure that the chosen tools can secure these assets. If you have many websites on a renowned cloud platform and only use a network security scanner, you are not going to be well-secured. If you have a large organization and only use precision tools like Metasploit, your IT staff is going to be overloaded.
Acunetix is the best choice in the following cases:
- If you have a major web presence. Acunetix is a specialized web vulnerability scanner built from the ground up to protect your web assets. Network security scanners (for example, Nessus or Qualys), source code analyzers (for example, Veracode or Checkmarx), and web application firewalls (for example, Incapsula) alone are not going to protect your web presence as well as Acunetix.
- If you feel that your web assets are at high risk of hacking. There are several excellent web security scanners on the market (for example, Netsparker, Burp Suite, Detectify, OWASP ZAP, Sitelock) but Acunetix offers specialized technologies that let you detect more and fix faster. With AcuMonitor, you can detect blind (out-of-band) vulnerabilities and with AcuSensor, you can pinpoint the location of the security issue.
- If you have an organization with a significant number of websites and/or web applications. If so, you can’t afford to hunt for false positives. You also need a tool with a focus on ease of use, centralization, automation, and integration. Acunetix provides all that and more.
- If you don’t want to hire a whole team of specialized penetration testers for basic tasks. Manual penetration testing is very important but spending pentester time on mundane activities is a waste. Manual pentest tools should be the second stage with a dedicated web security scanner as the first stage tool.
The core strength of Acunetix lies in its focus on web security, unlike solutions that cover a wider range of security aspects, for example, Tenable products. Key strong points of Acunetix are also scanning speed, the lowest number of false positives, ease of use, unique technologies (out-of-band monitoring and IAST), and SDLC integration. Acunetix is also one of the best-established solutions on the market so you can feel safe that it will continue to develop with you.
Additional Resources
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- Acunetix vs. Netsparker
- Acunetix vs. Burp Suite
- Acunetix vs. Nessus
- Acunetix vs. Qualys
- Acunetix vs. Probely
- Acunetix vs. Checkmarx
- Acunetix vs. Detectify
- Acunetix vs. Incapsula
- Acunetix vs. OWASP ZAP
- Acunetix vs. Sitelock
- Acunetix vs. Veracode
- Acunetix vs. Pentest-Tools
Frequently asked questions
Acunetix is known for its unmatched speed, accuracy, and powerful web application scanning capabilities. It is designed to help make life easier for security engineers and developers – easy to deploy and configure, so you can download, install, and scan in just a few clicks. It also features an easy-to-use streamlined UI and workflows to easily configure and execute scans.
Read more about why Acunetix is the leader of web application security.
After you request a demo and are satisfied with the results, you can get individual access to Acunetix to try it out yourself. This way, you can actually see it in action. You can use that, for example, to see how Acunetix excels when scanning intentionally vulnerable applications.
Learn how to use Acunetix to scan an intentionally vulnerable application.
What retail and open-source alternatives lack is a true and intentional focus on web application security (WAS). Acunetix was designed with the focus of helping smaller organizations provide comprehensive web application security by quickly pinpointing vulnerabilities, and allowing resource-restrained security and development teams to focus efforts on remediation instead of identifying and validating exploits.
Open-source web application security solutions are less secure because anyone can change the code that you are using. Such solutions also do not offer any support. Lastly, free web application security solutions are designed for use by manual penetration testers and have very limited automation capabilities if any at all.
Read more about the relationship between vulnerability scanning and penetration testing.
We use Acunetix as part of our Security in the SDLC and to test code in DEV and SIT before being promoted to Production.
