SHARE THIS POST

In today’s broad digital landscape, web app penetration testing is considered as one of the most important parts of a company’s vulnerability management program. Conducting a web app penetration test not only requires expertise, but it also needs a significant amount of time. In this age of steadily increasing cyber attacks, it has become essential to have a solid understanding of the web app penetration testing procedure. In this post, we’ll explain it in detail and the major aspects you’d need to keep in mind if you’re going for a web app penetration test for the first time.

What is web app penetration testing?

It refers to the process of detecting an application’s security vulnerabilities by evaluating the website and its associated services with different types of malicious techniques. The purpose of web app penetration testing is to secure sensitive data from cybercriminals who may gain unauthorized access to the application. A web app penetration testing is widely known as a pen test and the tester is widely considered as an ethical hacker.

Types of web app penetration testing

There’re two major ways to perform web app penetration testing. Let’s have a look at them.

External penetration testing

In this scenario, attacks are done from outside the company and involve testing web applications that are hosted on the internet. Testers are only given the IP of the target system to simulate these attacks.

Internal penetration testing

In this scenario, testing is performed within the company using its LAN and it involves testing of web applications that are hosted on the intranet. This helps testers to find out if there’re vulnerabilities that exist within the corporate firewall.

Final Takeaway

With the above information, you should get a good understanding of how to conduct a web app penetration testing and you can start testing. Once you’ve done your first testing, you must remember to log and collect all vulnerabilities in the system. Any scenario shouldn’t be ignored assuming that it won’t be executed by the end users.