Why should you conduct vulnerability assessment on your company website?
Organizations use different channels to reach their customers. The company website being the primary means of reaching your existing customers and potential customers these days. From startups to multinationals, every organization has their own website. For cyber attackers the company size is immaterial. As long as the website presents a vulnerability allowing the attackers to steal information or even to deface it, your company website is at risk.
Are you an owner of a business? Do you run your own organization? In this blog we will discuss why every company should carryout regular vulnerability assessments on their website.
Here are some of the common answers we receive when we ask company owners to perform vulnerability assessments,
“Our website has no sensitive information.”
“We have not connected any database to our website.”
“We are a small company, we don’t need security.”
Even though you don’t have any sensitive data, or the website is not connected to a database, still there are ways to exploit your website. This leads to the possibility of targeting your clients through your own website and use to distribute malware. If this happens, your clients will no longer trust you thus damaging your company’s credibility.
There is no doubt information is critical for any organization, whether it is your own data or your client’s data. Therefore, protection of information is the primary responsibility of any organization.
These are the some of the common questions most company owners have;
What if our web site leaks protected information???
How do I find out any malicious activity is happening on company web site???
Are users safe to visit our web site???
Vulnerability Assessment on your web applications can provide solutions to the above questions.
First, we identify what information we can find out about the company through public domains, specially the Internet. There are many opensource as well as commercial tools to gather information from public domains. This exercise allows us to find out whether any sensitive company information is visible from the outside.
The next step is automated scanning. This task is carried out using several commercial and open source tools. The best practice is to use more than one automated tool to scan the application as it will ensure high accuracy in the scanning results. In some instances, custom built tools are also utilized for scanning depending on the complexity of the system.
After this, a security assessor will perform manual testing to eliminate false positives. Therefore, the service of a qualified professional security tester is required when carrying out the Security Assessment. This comprehensive investigation will reveal exploitable areas of the web application, whether a breach has occurred and whether it is safe for users to browse the website.
I will continue with a series of blog posts explaining various methods that are used in exploiting a user through a website.