Web Security Audits are essential to ensure that your web application is robust. A Web Security Audit is a comprehensive procedure that checks your entire web application; this includes database, files, core, themes, and any other infrastructure for weaknesses & vulnerabilities. A complete web security audit, in most cases involves dynamic & static code examination, security error checking, configuration validations, etc. It also involves thorough usage and maintenance of security policies & procedures. The audit aims at detecting and correcting security flaws that can result in application downtime, data loss, unauthorized access, and server compromise. This helps to prevent these issues from happening by identifying, & addressing the defects in the various components involved.
ecurity vulnerability scanners help to find security holes in the application before the Web Security Audit and can help to determine the possible impact they may have. Some of the common vulnerabilities that could affect your web applications include SQL injection, cross-site scripting, URL spoofing, and denial of service attacks. In addition, a complete web security audit also detects and fixes the following issues:
While conducting a web security audit, you need to know what type of threats are likely to be faced by your website. To do so, you need to identify the threats that you currently face. For this purpose, the audit procedure identifies the most common vulnerabilities that could potentially affect your web application security and software. The vulnerabilities are then classified into different categories according to their severity.
When performing a web security audit, it is important to keep a number of factors in mind. One of the things that you should keep in mind is the level of protection provided by your website. Different types of threats need a different level of protection. In other words, you need to ensure that you have added protection levels for all the vulnerable areas of your website.
Before initiating a web security audit you should identify the areas that need more protection. For example, you should analyse whether or not you are providing any login information to external users. Other areas that need thorough examination include installation and configuration of scripts, database usage and access control, application security, cross-site scripting vulnerabilities, cookie tracking and information extraction. Depending on your requirements you can tailor your web application security audits accordingly.
A good web security audit must identify the security vulnerabilities that exist on your website. For this purpose a vulnerability scan, log analysis and Vulnerability Assessment is required. The vulnerability scan will help you identify which areas require more security attention and which ones do not. On the other hand, the log analysis will help you understand what activities are happening on your site and help in identifying what could be done to address the issues identified on the site.
The web application security audits should also identify the areas where improvement is required. A penetration test helps in this context. It helps you to test different types of attacks against your site to identify the loopholes that can be plugged to prevent any sort of issues. A web vulnerability audit aims at reducing the vulnerabilities that can be exploited by hackers.
The process of website security auditing varies with different organizations. You can either perform it yourself or contract with a professional organization for the job. Both options have their pros and cons, which have to be carefully weighed before you choose one over the other. A website security audit is an important process that helps in identifying the weak and vulnerable areas on your site so that appropriate countermeasures can be put in place to secure them. Web cybersecurity is an important issue nowadays, and it is better to get your website securely reviewed by experts before it is released to the public.
