Need of Security Testing for a Business Website

Website security is critical in today's world, where internet is now being used more than ever to perform day to day tasks. Software applications are a part of your everyday life as they are used on cell phones, television, planes, cars and even your home/office computers. It is now common for everyday appliances to be connected to the internet. Services required in the day to day life – taxes, stock trading, banking and businesses, are all conducted using the internet. Software is now being produced faster than ever, especially for businesses and large/small enterprises, but a large number of the workforce using these software are not aware of the importance of their security. Lack of knowledge in security testing, tight schedules and shrinking budgets of enterprises, have made business websites highly vulnerable.

Security testing does not relate to application functionality but to the integrity and confidentiality of available applications. This kind of security testing is referred to as 'nonfunctional requirements (NFR) testing'. NFR testing, which determines the flexibility, security and quality of software, is based on the theory that nonfunctional requirements represents how the software should perform a task.

Security testing if done properly, goes deeper and beyond the functional testing and probing on the presentation layer. By analyzing risks in a system and creating tests specifically meant for those risks, a software security tester can focus on areas where a business website might be attacked and the attacker might succeed. Software security checks how a software will behave in case of a malicious attack, even though software failures in websites mostly happen spontaneously in the real world.  

Following is a list of the most dangerous Web Application Security flaws affecting businesses worldwide:

·         Insufficient Transport Layer Protection

·         Insecure Cryptography Storage

·         Invalidated Redirects and Forwards

·         Failure to restrict URL access

·         Security Misconfiguration

·         Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF)

·         Insecure Direct Object References

·         Broken Authentication and Session Management

·         Cross-site Scripting

·         Injection

A security tester will think about breaking the application in the same way as a malicious hacker, trying to create a problem with the underlying code. The more a security tester thinks out of the box, more safer a web application will become.

High end Application Penetration Testing/Application Security, combines automated application security testing with detailed manual business logic testing. In application or website security, a hybrid approach will discover vulnerabilities missed out by automated tools. Such vulnerability testing detect the most essential business logic flaws that are not possible to be discovered otherwise. Extensive work flow automation is done along with thorough manual validation. To ensure proactive website security of enterprises, application penetration testing should be done regularly and during every release.

As the number of business transactions on the web increases and most of the critical business data is stored in web applications, proper security testing of web applications becomes most crucial. Security and stability should not be limited to the testing phase but should have proper and consistent importance right from the design phase.