A Step-by-Step Guide to Conducting Effective Penetration Testing on Your Website

The Need for Website Penetration Testing

Every minute, a new cyberattack happens on some website. An enormous number of websites are getting attacked by criminals who want to exploit sensitive data. Be it a startup or a well-established company, no business is safe from these cyber threats. Website penetration testing informs you of possible risks that can arise from the exploitation of vulnerabilities like cross-site scripting and SQL injections. This always helps your website manage risks more effectively.

Benefits of website penetration testing include:

• Evaluating security controls: Know the effectiveness of your current security structure. Evaluate security measures like access controls, firewalls, and intrusion detection systems.
• Measuring Compliance: Check if your website follows the necessary industry standards and regulations such as HIPAA, PCI-DSS, ISO 27001, etc.
• Mitigating Risk: Predict and prepare for a cyber-attack that could lead to data breaches, financial loss, and reputational damage. 
• Improving Incident Report: Identify problems with your incident response plan and get a chance to test and improve it.
• Protecting your Clientele: Any security breach can significantly affect your clients, partners, and the overall business. Regular penetration testing makes your website secure, building a sense of trust among your clientele
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Also Read:  What is the Purpose of Penetration Testing?

The Process of Website Penetration Testing ?

Let’s get to the most important part – the entire penetration testing process for the website. Depending on your industry and specification, the details of the process may alter, but the core strategy remains the same. Here are the steps carried out for website penetration testing:

Information Gathering

The first step of website penetration testing involves gathering as much information as possible about the website. Here, the company provides knowledge about the website’s source code, site architecture, and more to the penetration testing team. This information helps them get a better understanding of the target platform and prepares them to start the search for vulnerabilities. The best methods to collect information are:

• Active Information Gathering

In this method, the pentesters actively interact with the target website to gather all the necessary information. The test team usually uses tools like scanners and mappers to find potential breaches in the website’s defense. This is the easier approach, and the results are more detail-oriented. 

• Passive Information Gathering

As the name suggests, this approach is the exact opposite of active gathering. Here, the testers acquire all possible information about the website without interacting with it directly. This involves researching available information about the organization, its employees, or the software they use publicly. This type of information-gathering approach requires a longer period, and the results may need to be more thorough.

Planning

Then, the penetration testing team establishes clear goals by getting deep into the website’s complex technicality. Through proper research and strategic approaches, they tailor their methods to target specific cyber threats and vulnerabilities on the website.

After the research, a well-informed website security testing strategy is created, describing the scope, methodology, and testing criteria. Apart from that, the company may provide a high-level checklist to guide the testing team through their process. Then, by creating proper parameters, the team prepares all the necessary testing equipment and validates the testing script to guarantee an effective assessment. 

Automation Penetration Testing

This is a technique used in the process of penetration testing to identify vulnerabilities on the website using specialized automated tools. These tools mimic possible attackers by crawling through the website and discovering potential vulnerabilities and security flaws. This invasive scan approach allows pentesters to scan the website and find surface-level vulnerabilities in the staging environment quickly and efficiently. 

There are several benefits of using automated tools to find vulnerabilities, such as:

• Efficiency
• Consistency
• Accuracy

However, it is important to note that automated tools are not a proper replacement for manual testing by expert cybersecurity professionals. Instead, they are a useful added complement to other penetration testing techniques and can help identify potential vulnerabilities much quicker to a certain extent. Additionally, these tools can also generate false positives or miss vulnerabilities, so it’s vital to review the results thoroughly and validate any potential issues before taking any action.

Manual Penetration Testing

This is the most effective way to find out potential loopholes in a website through which an attacker might breach. Unlike automation testing, manual website penetration testing requires human expertise and knowledge to identify vulnerabilities that automated tools may miss. These tests require high-level skills and are typically performed by cybersecurity professionals or ethical hackers. However, it should be noted that manual penetration testing is time-consuming and requires proper resources, but it can identify vulnerabilities better than automation. 

Manual testing also aids in identifying new or previously undiscovered vulnerabilities that are absent from the current vulnerability databases. Furthermore, manual penetration testing offers a more in-depth insight into the security posture, which can be used in developing a more robust security strategy. 

Here’s what is included in manual penetration testing:

• Injection Testing: Includes SQL injection, command injection, template injection, etc.
• Data Tampering: Involves web service configuration review, header testing, outdated software testing, etc.
• Encryption Testing: Contains weal SSL/TLS cipher testing, improper cryptography testing, etc.
• Web Server Configuration Review: Also includes header testing, outdated software testing, and more.
• File Testing: Involves downloading and uploading functionality testing, directory traversal, LFI, RFI, etc.
• Outdated Component Testing: includes logic flaws testing, data manipulation testing, security function-specific testing, etc. 
• Input Validation Testing: Consists of XSS, HTML injection, unvalidated redirects, remote code execution, and more.
• Sensitive Information Disclosure Testing: Involves session fixation, hijacking, invalided session testing, etc.
• WordPress Common Vulnerabilities Check: Included web-based API testing, JWT testing, SSO testing, etc.

Analysis and Reporting:

The website penetration testing team identifies and categorizes the discovered vulnerabilities. A senior cyber security professional carries out a high-level penetration test and analyses the results thoroughly. The report of the results showcases the vulnerabilities detected and the security posture of the website. The report helps the clients and their developers get detailed information about the vulnerabilities and security flaws, along with suggestions to fix them.

Here are the activities carried out by the penetration testing assessment team:

Likelihood Determination: For each vulnerability detected, the assessment team evaluates the likelihood of it being exploited considering the following factors

• Motivation and capability of the threat source
• Nature of the vulnerability
• Existence and effectiveness of controls

Impact Analysis: For each vulnerability, the assessment team analyses and calculates the impact of exploitation on the integrity, confidentiality, and availability of systems and data.

Severity Determination: The assessment team evaluates the likelihood and consequences of exploitation of each vulnerability to determine its severity. This is done by considering both the probability and impact of an attack and assigning it a classification of critical, high, medium, or low.

Want to check out what a real website penetration testing report looks like? Download a copy of our sample report right here!