As the popularity of the web increases and web applications become tools of everyday use, the role of web security has been gaining importance as well. The last years have shown a significant increase in the number of web-based attacks. For example, there has been extensive press coverage of recent security incidences involving the loss of sensitive credit card information belonging to millions of customers.

Typical web application security vulnerabilities result from generic input validation problems. Examples of such vulnerabilities are SQL injection and Cross-Site Scripting (XSS). Although the majority of web vulnerabilities are easy to understand and to avoid, many web developers are, unfortunately, not security-aware. As a result, there exist many web sites on the web that are vulnerable.

SecuBat is a generic and modular web vulnerability scanner that, similar to a port scanner, automatically analyzes web sites with the aim of finding exploitable SQL injection and XSS vulnerabilities.

Software Requirements

• Windows 2000, XP, 2003 or higher
• .NET Framework 2.0 or higher
• MS SQL Server 2000, 2005, Express, MSDE or higher

Known Issues

• If you schedule a crawling run, you have to restart SecuBat for manually selecting this crawling run for
  an attacking run afterwards if you not choose to do a combined run.
• The XSS variants report a not existing vulnerability if the response page contains the injected string within the title tag.
• The “Attack Report” window shows only attacks with an analysis value greater than 0 (indicating a vulnerability).

You can also find out more from the SecuBat paper published here:

secubat.pdf [PDF]

You can download SecuBat v0.5 here:

SecuBat v0.5.zip

Or read more here.

You may remember a while back we did a Review of Acunetix Web Vulnerability Scanner 6 – the very full featured web vulnerability scanning software.

Well the latest version has been released recently with some updates, bug fixes and improvements on the web application security front.

I’m hoping to try out the AcuSensor on a PHP install soon to see what kind of information it can give me.

A full review isn’t really need as the installation, interface and features are mostly the same as version 6.

One of the great new features is the Login Sequence Recorder (LSR), which can record the exact sequence needed to login to a site and replay it.

Combine this with the Session Auto Recognition module, which will identify when a logged in session is invalided or expired and will re-login automatically and you have a great tool for scanning authentication based web applications.

There is also a lot more support for JSP/Tomcat based application, I haven’t had chance to test this as I don’t deal with many Java based web applications.

Also included are some back-end and interface changes like the display of port scan & network alerts separately from the web alerts, which does make it easier to see where the issues are.

Backend stuff like cookie handling and Blind SQL Injection methods have been improved, you can also import your settings from Version 6 if you are currently using that.

You can read the press release here, or more on the blog here.

The pricing can be found here (in both Euros and USD).

If you want to know more about the features you can download the manual here:

Acunetix WVS 6.5 Manual [PDF]

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/

As you might know if you’ve been reading for some time, I do occasionally review commercial software if it’s interesting and relevant – the last one I remember doing was back in 2007 “Outpost Security Suite PRO Review“.

This time it’s for a much more relevant piece of software IMHO, and one which I actually like using and have used in the past – Acunetix Web Vulnerability Scanner 6. Version 6 was recently released and has some quite exciting new features including the new more accurate Acusensor, Port Scanner and Network Alerts tool and actual Blind SQL Injection.

If you were previously using version 5 and you’re interesting in version 6 there are some good progressive changes. One good development is AcuSensor which goes much more in depth into web application security testing and code injection (it can find vulnerabilities that typical black box scanning wouldn’t). The new Port Scanning feature will perform some kind of Nessus like function and try and find vulnerabilities in network services, you can learn more about adding your own vulnerability scripts here.

Something important for me too is the additional of Pausing a scan, this is very useful especially on a long scan when you can only carry it out during off peak hours.

There are some other minor improvements like the ability to mark an alert as a false positive, improvements in the scheduler and general improvements in the searching and filtering features.

Installation

Installation is very easy, there are very few options to select and it’s just a next-next kind of install. There is the option of installing the BETA Firefox Plugin, which is pretty neat. No reboot is required during install, but you do need to Restart Firefox if you wish to utilize the Plugin.

Getting Started

Once you fire up the software it will let you know if there are any updates, it’s managed very well with no manual action needed by the user.

With the wizard it’s very easy to start a scan or any of the other tasks within WVS.

Once the target is selected it allows you to optimize the scan for various different technologies depending on the architecture of the site (PHP, ASP, Perl and so on).

Then the scanning options – it gives you 3 main options for scanning; Extensive, Heuristic and Quick.

It also offers you some variety in crawling options, how deep you want to go, should you scan above the root directory or only below and then after that it’s basically on auto-pilot (it does give you the option for HTTP Authentication if you need to scan something behind a login/password).

Features

The crawling and scanning is pretty comprehensive, whilst the scan is taking place it give you updates in terms of progress and in terms of anything it has found (categorised).

The progress section is quite detailed and shows which module is running, on which page of the site and generally what is happening (some scripts run concurrently).

As for anything it finds out of the ordinary, threats are categorised into 3 levels – High, Medium & Low. On top of that there is also info and knowledge base (such as which ports are open).

There are also other useful tools such as the HTTP Fuzzer and Sniffer which are good for examining HTTP traffic in detail and especially for exposing weak authentication schemes.

AcuSensor is interesting because it actually has a server side component, both for ASP.NET applications and PHP based web apps. This means that it can tell you exactly where in your code the flaw is – like this SQL Injection Vulnerability found in Mambo by AcuSensor.

There’s another example about backdoor code in web applications here, with the example this time being the WordPress 2.1.1 Vulnerability.

This is the first time I’ve encountered this kind of technology and I think it’s an excellent step forwards in automated code auditing and deeper web application security.

Surprisingly I also found some Legislation and Compliance reports inside the WVS, this was a welcome surprise (as I’ve been involved in many ISO27001 projects) something like this can really save time.

Conclusion

All in all it’s a well rounded tool with a pretty accurate scanning engine (You can find a list of vulnerabilities it checks for here including those for specific software), it’s come a long way since the earlier versions and is now quite strong in all areas of web application security testing.

The new AcuSensor also ensures more vulnerabilities are found and less false positives delivered – false positives are the bane of any vulnerability scanner. That’s where the consultant skill comes in, ascertaining which are real and which are not.

A good part is it’s quite usable by less technical people as it gives in-depth descriptions on both a conceptual and a technical level enabling people to understand the issue uncovered.

Darknet recommends Acunetix Web Vulnerability Scanner 6 highly, it could make a real difference to your work flow for the consultants and for the in-house guys it could help improve the security, stability and integrity of your web applications.

You can find more reviews about Acunetix WVS here and some Customer Testimonials here.

If you wish to read more about Acunetix WVS you can do so here and you can find the prices here (in both Euros and USD).

You can also check out WVS Free Edition.