Performing a penetration test on a web app involves following systematic processes, including enumerating the target application, identifying vulnerabilities, and exploiting the vulnerabilities that could be leveraged to compromise an application. Throughout a web application pen test, a penetration tester or a cyber security specialist evaluates an application’s security by exploiting it, just like an attacker would. For example, the specialist will look into how an unauthorized person could access the application’s sensitive data.
For this purpose, a web application penetration test helps organizations to find security flaws in applications that adversaries could readily exploit. At the very least, a web application penetration test includes checks for the following vulnerabilities (included in the OWASP Top 10 Web Application Security Risks):
- Broken Access Control
- Cryptographic Failures
- Injection
- Insecure Design
- Security Misconfiguration
- Vulnerable & Outdated Components
- Identification & Authentication Failures
- Software & Data Integrity Failures
- Security Logging & Monitoring Failures
- Server-Side Request Forgery