I saw a relevant paper published today by an individual that claims the comparison was ordered by a penetration testing company (a company which remains unnamed).

The vendors were not contacted during or after the evaluation.

Testing Procedure

The author tested 13 web applications (some of them containing a lot of vulnerabilities), 3 demo applications provided by the vendors:

• testphp.acunetix.com
• demo.testfire.net
• zero.webappsecurity.com

And some tests were done to verify JavaScript execution capabilities.

In total, 16 applications were tested.

An attempt was made to try and cover all the major platforms, so applications in PHP, ASP, ASP.NET and Java were used.

Note for Application Tests:

The report only included “important/critical/major” vulnerabilities like SQL injection, Local/Remote File Inclusion, XSS – Vulnerabilities like “Unencrypted Login Form”, “Directory listing found”, “Email address found” were not included to avoid clutter.

SQL injection vulnerabilities can be discovered through error messages or blind SQL injection. Some scanners are showing 2 alerts: one for the vulnerability found through error message and another for the blind technique. In these cases only one vulnerability has been counted.

The scanners were rated as follows:

You can download the full PDF report here:

WebVulnScanners.pdf

And the associated JavaScript files used for testing here:

WebVulnScanners-JS.zip

The original file location is:

http://drop.io/anantasecfiles/

Author’s blog – http://anantasec.blogspot.com/