With the spread of digitization across domains, cybercriminals are having a field day. They are leveraging every trick in the book to hack into websites or applications to steal confidential information or disrupt the functioning of an organization’s digital systems. Even statistics buttress the malevolent role of cybercriminals with scary projections. Accordingly, by the end of 2021, the world is going to be poorer by $6 trillion as cybercrime is expected to extract its pound of flesh. And by 2025, the figure is expected to touch $10.5 trillion. No wonder, security testing is pursued with renewed zeal by organizations cutting across domains, with the market size expected to touch $16.9 billion by 2025. One of the measures to implement cybersecurity testing is the use of security testing frameworks. The importance of using such frameworks lies in the fact that they can guide organizations in complying with regulations and security policies relevant to a particular sector. Let us take you through 10 such open-source security testing frameworks to ensure the protection of data in a digital system and maintain its functionality.
10 open-source security testing frameworks
To identify and mitigate the presence of vulnerabilities and flaws in a web or mobile application, there are many open-source security testing frameworks. These can be customized to match the requirements of each organization and find vulnerabilities such as SQL Injection, Broken Authentication, Cross-Site Scripting (XSS), Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF), Session Management, and Security Misconfigurations, among others.
#1 Synk: Licensed by Apache, Synk is an open-source vendor application security testing framework that detects underlying vulnerabilities and fixes the same during the development cum testing process. It can be used to secure all components of any cloud-based native application and features continuous AI learning and semantic code analysis in real-time.
#2 NetSparker: It is a one-stop destination for all security needs, which can be easily integrated into any type of development or test environment. NetSparker features a proof-based scanning technology that can identify glitches such as Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) and verify false positives in websites or applications, thereby eliminating the investment in man-hours.
#3 Acunetix: A powerful application security testing solution to secure your web environment and APIs by detecting vulnerabilities such as SQL injection, Cross-Site Scripting (XSS), and others. It has a DeepScan crawler that can scan HTML websites and client-side SPAs. Using this, users can export identified vulnerabilities to trackers such as GitHub, Atlassian JIRA, Bugzilla, Mantis, and others.
#4 w3af: Built using Python, the w3af attack and audit framework is a free application security scanner to find and exploit vulnerabilities in web applications during penetration testing.
#5 Zed Attack Proxy (ZAP): Built by OWASP (Open Web Application Security Project), ZAP is an open-source and multi-platform software security testing tool to detect vulnerabilities in a web application. Written in Java, ZAP can intercept a proxy to manually test a webpage and expose errors such as private IP disclosure, SQL injection, missing anti-CSRF tokens, XSS injection, and others.
#6 ImmuniWeb: Employing artificial intelligence, ImmuniWeb is a security platform to conduct security testing. With a one-click patching system, the platform can ensure continuous compliance monitoring and boasts proprietary technology to check for privacy, compliance, and server hardening.
#7 Wapiti: A command-line application to detect scripts and forms where data can be injected. It conducts a black box scan by injecting payloads to check if the detected scripts are vulnerable. Wapiti is capable of generating reports in several features and formats highlighting vulnerabilities such as database injection, Cross-Site Scripting (XSS), file disclosure, and .htaccess configuration, among others.
#8 Vega: Written in Java, this open-source scanning tool working on OSX, Windows, and Linux platforms can detect vulnerabilities such as shell injection, blind SQL injection, and Cross-Site Scripting, among others. Its intercepting proxy facilitates tactical inspection by monitoring client-server communication. The detection modules can create new attack modules using APIs.
#9 Arachni: A free Ruby-based framework, Arachni is leveraged by penetration testers to evaluate the security of web applications. Supporting all major operating systems, this multi-platform cybersecurity testing tool can uncover scores of vulnerabilities, including XSS injection, SQL injection, and invalidated redirect, among others.
#10 Google Nogotofail: A network security testing framework, it can detect known vulnerabilities and misconfigurations such as TLS/SSL. It offers a flexible method of scanning, detecting, and fixing SSL/TLS connections. To be set up as a VPN server, router, or proxy server, it works with major operating systems such as iOS, Android, Windows, OSX, or Linux.
Conclusion
The above-mentioned tools/frameworks used by security testing services can be chosen as per the security testing requirements of organizations. With cybersecurity threats being faced by organizations across domains, the use of these frameworks can keep an organization in good stead in securing customer and business data, adhering to regulatory standards, and delivering superior customer experiences.
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James Daniel is a software Tech enthusiastic & works at Cigniti Technologies. I'm having a great understanding of today's software testing quality that yields strong results and always happy to create valuable content & share thoughts.
Article Source: wattpad.com