Startup Security

General Web Application Scanners

• IBM Rational AppScan (formerly Watchfire)
• HP WebInspect (formerly SPI Dynamics)
• Cenzic Hailstorm

SQL Injection Tools

• IBM Exploiter
• Absinthe

In keeping up-to-date with your network presence and attack surface, scanning tools can be extremely useful in making this process easier. There are two tools in the free-ish model that are indispensable.

• Nmap – Nmap can be used, at a minimum, to scan for open ports on any range of IP addresses or hosts.
• Nessus – Nessus can scan those systems for specific vulnerabilities.

One of my favorite “free” HTTP proxies (because it’s under active development) is the Burp Suite. It seems the author(s?) is hard at work on a new version and is promoting it with a Month of Burp Pr0n, a post every day on the new features that are coming in version 1.2. It looks like the new version will have active scanning and target filtering, which have definitely been on my personal wishlist.

One of my favorite features of the tool is Burp Intruder. In instances where authorization bypass is a possibility, or incrementing integers are utilized for record id’s, Intruder is a very handy way of brute-forcing your access to data you may not have authorization for. As an example, I just used Intruder to increment through a few hundred id’s on an application to gain access to and analyze data I shouldn’t have access to.

Burp is great and in addition to the features mentioned above, it looks like it may also have passive scanning like ratproxy by Google. Exciting stuff!

HTTP Proxy Tools are essential to any web application security engineer, and there are several options out there. For the purpose of this page, we’ll delineate them by in-browser and standalone.

IN BROWSER

Firefox

• Tamper Data
• Firebug

Every developer has their suite of tools (Emacs, Vim, Eclipse, TextMate, snippets from years past), and in a similar fashion every security engineer has their favorite tools. Listed below are some of my preferred tools for performing web application assessments.

This is definitely a work in progress that I will be expanding as the site grows.

HTTP Interception and Debugging

• HTTP Proxy Tools
• Network Scanning Tools
• Web App Scanners