Acutenix Vulnerability Scanner

The Acunetix vulnerability scanner is an automated web application security testing tool. Acunetix is used to scan your web applications and checks for a wide variety of exploitable vulnerabilities. The Acunetix vulnerability scanner works on any web application or website via browser and utilizes the standard HTTP/HTTPS protocol. Acunetix analyzes software and custom web applications that use JavaScript.

The alternative is manual auditing to find your vulnerabilities. This sort of audit can be complex and difficult, since it generally involves processing a large volume of data. It is better to have valuable human capital, such as penetration test teams, to work on the more challenging vulnerabilities and the newest exploits. The Acunetix scanner can easily handle all of the well known routine vulnerabilities across the great bulk of applications.

Acunetix is an important tool for the development of secure web applications. Acunetix scans for new attack paths that threat actors can use to access your web applications and your data. Acunetix can scan your web application, identify all the files accessible from the internet and simulate threat actor activity in order to identify vulnerable components.

Acunetix can also be used to probe the code which makes up a web application. This helps find potential vulnerabilities that may not be easily discovered from the internet but still exist within the web application.

The Acunetix vulnerability scanner is simple to use. Acunetix will analyze the entire website by following all the links on the site, including dynamic links that use JavaScript. Acunetix will also test links found in robots.txt and sitemap.xml. The result is a map of the site, which Acunetix will use to launch targeted checks against each part of the site.

A robots.txt file tells search engine crawlers which URLs the crawler can access on your site. A Sitemap is an XML file which contains the URLs for a website. Sitemap.xml facilitates the operation of search engines to find URLs that may be isolated from the rest of the site’s content. The Sitemaps protocol is a URL inclusion protocol which complements a URL exclusion protocol such as robots.txt.

If enabled, the Acunetix sensor will retrieve a listing of all the files present in the web application directory. Acunetic will add the files not found by the crawl process to the crawler output. In general these files usually are not discovered by the crawler. This is because they are not accessible from the web server nor linked through the website. Acunetix sensor also finds and analyzes files such as web.config which is not easily found from the internet.

Once crawling is complete Acunetix will automatically launch vulnerability checks on each page found. Acunetix then analyzes each page for places where it can input data and then attempts this in varying combinations. The vulnerabilities identified are shown in the Acunetix Scan Results. Each Acunetix vulnerability alert contains detailed information about the vulnerability. This can include the POST data used, impacted items, the HTTP response of the server and much more.

Acunetix sensor may also provide details such as source code line number or queries leading to the identified vulnerabilities, as well as recommendations on how to fix the vulnerability. There are a wide variety of reports available from Acunetix including important compliance reports such as PCI DSS or ISO 270001. The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) is a set of security standards designed to validate that companies that accept, process, store or transmit credit card information maintain the necessary secure environment. ISO/IEC 27001 is a widely known information security management system (ISMS) framework.

Acunetix sensor allows you to identify a wide variety of vulnerabilities without many false positives. Acunetix provides increased accuracy for PHP, .NET and JAVA web applications. This is achieved by the combination of black box scanning techniques and sensors inside the source code. Acunetix technology uses both techniques together to achieve significantly better results than using source code analyzers and black box scanning separately.

During the execution of an online audit the online version of Acunetix will execute a network security audit of the server hosting the website. This scan will identify services running on the scanned server by running a port scan on the system and will then report the operating system and software hosting detected.

The network vulnerability scan also assesses security for DNS, SNMP, SMTP, IMAP, FTP, POP3, SSH, and Telnet. Acunetix will also check for misconfiguration in the services detected which might result in a security breach.

Acunetix can also integrate with the OpenVAS network scanner to check for many thousands of network vulnerabilities. Acunetix uses port probing and OS fingerprinting techniques to identify devices during a network scan. It also identifies operating systems and other program products. Security checks are launched against the products identified on the scanned server which allows the identification of all vulnerabilities.

What makes Acunetix better? The strongest features of Acunetix include scanning speed, low false positives, unique capabilities such as out-of-band monitoring and IAST, and SDLC integration. Acunetix has been on the market for years and used by many thousands of users – it is recognized as a reliable and strong vulnerability scanning solution.

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