A Guide to Website Penetration Testing

by Purvi Chabra Marketing Consultant

Businesses have learned the tough way that vulnerabilities and loopholes can cost them a lot of money and data. Many businesses have discovered one or more vulnerabilities that are nothing but a ticking time bomb and they need to identify and patch up these loopholes at the earliest to protect their website.

What are website testing and vulnerability assessment?

Vulnerability assessment identifies and lists all existing vulnerabilities on your website. It is more of an initial step in the procedure and can use both manual and automatic ways Website testing on the other hand focuses more on how each vulnerability can be exploited or used. Being a manual process, it uses findings and exploits them to test the degree of risk attached to it. Both these procedures concern the same area but are not alike. This confusion of both has led business owners to pick one when they really need the other and vice versa. Here’s a guide to why you need website testing.

Why do you need website testing?

You need to identify your website’s insecurities so that you are never caught off guard and your brand is protected. Website testing allows you to anticipate possible risks and mishaps that could take place and urges you to build better risk management for your site. Even if you are a small brand you still need website testing as your brand could be targeted by cyberattacks and third-party applications if left unattended.

Website testing can help you uncover serious security flaws that could cause you to lose vital information and protects your assets, it gives the company a list of improvements that need to be made on the website for it to look and feel safer for consumers. Besides this, it emulates real-life website attacks and sees which parts of your site is more at risk and helps to rectify that, it also uncovers vulnerabilities that could lead to data leakage and in turn have bad legal consequences. Hiring a team will help to cope up with real-life cyber-attacks.

How is website testing done?

Website penetration testing is done in three phases:

1.The first phase is to gather information and trying to find the fingerprints at the back end of the website. This includes the person who has designed it along with the server OS, CMS version, and more.

2.Secondly, the automatic tools are deployed to uncover any known flaws or vulnerabilities also knows as CVEs in the respective areas on the site.

3.Lastly, the goal here is to leverage any vulnerabilities or flaws which are discovered by looking in the second phase. This is done to weed out any false positives and is also used to remove and important information from the target and safeguard the same.

Final Thoughts

An information security audit is quite important for everyone, be it small brands or big corporations and there are plenty of tools available to conduct a website penetration test. If you are fairly new to this field you can always ask a professional or a security expert to help set it up for you, monitor, and report any vulnerabilities in a detailed and easy-to-understand way. They will also provide you with certain steps and processes to do to fix your site's errors or even do the patching in themselves. These professionals will check your website for any loopholes and fix any vulnerable data or important information ensuring that cybercriminals or third-party users are unable to access the same, your site won’t get hacked. In fact, it will remain secure and safe for you and your consumers.