Most Important Web Application Pentesting Tools & Resources – 2024

Web Application Pentesting Tools are more often used by security industries to test the vulnerabilities of web-based applications.

Here you can find the Comprehensive Web Application Pentesting Tools list that covers Performing Penetration testing Operations in all Corporate Environments.

Web application penetration testing, often referred to as web app pen testing or ethical hacking, is a critical step in securing web applications.

There are several important tools and resources that security professionals and ethical hackers should be aware of to effectively assess and secure web applications.

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Table of Contents

FAQ
Web Application Pentesting Tools
Organization
Web Application Firewall
Scanning / Pentesting
Runtime Application Self-Protection
Development
Usability
Big Data
DevOps
Books
Documentation
Tools
Cheat Sheets
Docker images for Penetration Testing
Vulnerabilities
Courses
Online Hacking Demonstration Sites
Labs
SSL
Security Ruby on Rails
Conclusion

FAQ

1. What is web application penetration testing?

Web application penetration testing, also called “web app pen testing,” is a way to check the security of web services by making them look like they are under attack. Its main purpose is to find security holes, weak spots, and possible threats in web applications like websites and web services.

Exploiting these weaknesses is something that penetration testers do by hand and with automatic tools. This shows hackers where they could get in.

2. What are the benefits of penetration testing?

Penetration testing has many advantages:

Vulnerability Identification: It finds and fixes system and application vulnerabilities before attackers do.

Penetration testing gives firms assurance that their security measures are effective against real-world threats.

Compliance: Regular penetration testing helps firms avoid fines and legal concerns under many regulatory frameworks and industry standards.

By identifying and fixing vulnerabilities, penetration testing decreases the risk of data breaches, financial losses, and brand damage.

Continuous Improvement: It encourages proactive security by reviewing and updating security measures to meet changing threats.

3. Is penetration testing good or bad?

Enhancing cybersecurity via penetration testing is recommended. It prevents harmful attacks by proactively discovering and fixing vulnerabilities. However, without permission or ethics, it might be illegal and destructive.

Responsible and permitted penetration testing by skilled professionals improves security, but unauthorized or malicious testing is immoral and unlawful, posing legal risks to enterprises.

Web Application Pentesting Tools

Web application penetration testing involves assessing the security of web applications to identify vulnerabilities and weaknesses.

Various tools can assist security professionals, ethical hackers, and developers in this process. Here are some essential web application penetration testing tools:

Organization

• OWASP – The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) is a 501(c)(3) worldwide not-for-profit charitable organization focused on improving the security of software.

Web Application Firewall

• ModSecurity – ModSecurity is a toolkit for real-time web application monitoring, logging, and access control.
• NAXSI – NAXSI is an open-source, high-performance, low-rules maintenance WAF for NGINX, NAXSI means Nginx Anti Xss & Sql Injection.
• sql_firewall SQL Firewall Extension for PostgreSQL
• ironbee – IronBee is an open-source project to build a universal Web Application Pentesting Tool. IronBee as a framework for developing a system for securing web applications – a framework for building a web application firewall (WAF).
• Indusface – A new age web application firewall aimed at thwarting the threat actors to exfiltrate into the system, by detecting the application vulnerabilities, malware, and logical flaws.

Scanning / Pentesting

• sqlmap – sqlmap is an open-source Web Application Penetration Testing Tool that automates the process of detecting and exploiting SQL injection flaws and taking over database servers.
• It comes with a powerful detection engine, many niche features for the ultimate penetration tester, and a broad range of switches lasting from database fingerprinting, over data fetching from the database, to accessing the underlying file system and executing commands on the operating system via out-of-band connections.
• ZAP – The Zed Attack Proxy (ZAP) is an easy-to-use integrated Web Application Pentesting Tool for finding vulnerabilities in web applications.
• It is designed to be used by people with a wide range of security experience and as such is ideal for developers and functional testers who are new to penetration testing.
• ZAP provides automated scanners as well as a set of tools that allow you to find security vulnerabilities manually.
• OWASP Testing Checklist v4 – List of some controls to test during a web vulnerability assessment. The markdown version may be found here.
• w3af – w3af is a Web Application Attack and Audit Framework. The project’s goal is to create a framework to help you secure your web applications by finding and exploiting all web application vulnerabilities.
• Recon-ng – Recon-ng is a full-featured Web Reconnaissance framework written in Python. Recon-ng has a look and feels similar to the Metasploit Framework.
• PTF – The Penetration Testers Framework (PTF) is a way for modular support for up-to-date tools.
• Infection Monkey – A semi-automatic pen-testing tool for mapping/pen-testing networks. Simulates a human attacker.
• ACSTIS – ACSTIS helps you to scan certain web applications for AngularJS Client-Side Template Injection (sometimes referred to as CSTI, sandbox escape, or sandbox bypass).
• It supports scanning a single request but also crawling the entire web application for the AngularJS CSTI vulnerability.

Runtime Application Self-Protection

• Sqreen – Sqreen is a Runtime Application Self-Protection (RASP) solution for software teams. An in-app agent instruments and monitors the app.
• Suspicious user activities are reported and attacks are blocked at runtime without code modification or traffic redirection.

Development

• Secure by Design – Book that identifies design patterns and coding styles that make lots of security vulnerabilities less likely. (early access, published continuously, final release fall 2017)
• Securing DevOps – Book that explores how the techniques of DevOps and Security should be applied together to make cloud services safer. (early access, published continuously, final release January 2018)
• Understanding API Security – a Free eBook sampler that gives some context for how API security works in the real world by showing how APIs are put together and how the OAuth protocol can be used to protect them.
• OAuth 2 in Action – Book that teaches you the practical use and deployment of OAuth 2 from the perspectives of a client, an authorization server, and a resource server.

Usability

• Usable Security Course – Usable Security course at Coursera. Quite good for those looking for how security and usability intersect.

Big Data

• data_hacking – Examples of using IPython, Pandas, and Scikit Learn to get the most out of your security data.
• hadoop-pcap – Hadoop library to read packet capture (PCAP) files.
• Workbench – A scalable Python framework for security research and development teams.
• OpenSOC – OpenSOC integrates a variety of open-source big data technologies in order to offer a centralized tool for security monitoring and analysis.
• Apache Metron (incubating) – Metron integrates a variety of open-source big data technologies in order to offer a centralized tool for security monitoring and analysis.
• Apache Spot (incubating) – Apache Spot is open-source software for leveraging insights from flow and packet analysis.
• binarypig – Scalable Binary Data Extraction in Hadoop. Malware Processing and Analytics over Pig, Exploration through Django, Twitter Bootstrap, and Elasticsearch.

DevOps

• Securing DevOps – A book on Security techniques for DevOps that reviews state-of-the-art practices used in securing web applications and their infrastructure.

Books

• http://www.amazon.com/The-Web-Application-Hackers-Handbook/dp/8126533404/ The Web Application Hacker’s Handbook: Finding and Exploiting Security Flaws
• http://www.amazon.com/Hacking-Web-Apps-Preventing-Application/dp/159749951X/ Hacking Web Apps: Detecting and Preventing Web Application Penetration Testing Problems
• http://www.amazon.com/Hacking-Exposed-Web-Applications-Third/dp/0071740643/ Hacking Exposed Web Applications
• http://www.amazon.com/SQL-Injection-Attacks-Defense-Second/dp/1597499633/ SQL Injection Attacks and Defense
• http://www.amazon.com/Tangled-Web-Securing-Modern-Applications/dp/1593273886/ The Tangled WEB: A Guide to Securing Modern Web Applications
• http://www.amazon.com/Web-Application-Obfuscation-Evasion-Filters/dp/1597496049/ Web Application Obfuscation: ‘-/WAFs..Evasion..Filters//alert(/Obfuscation/)-‘
• http://www.amazon.com/XSS-Attacks-Scripting-Exploits-Defense/dp/1597491543/ XSS Attacks: Cross Site Scripting Exploits and Defense
• http://www.amazon.com/Browser-Hackers-Handbook-Wade-Alcorn/dp/1118662091/ The Browser Hacker’s Handbook
• http://www.amazon.com/Basics-Web-Hacking-Techniques-Attack/dp/0124166008/ The Basics of Web Hacking: Tools and Techniques to Attack the Web
• http://www.amazon.com/Web-Penetration-Testing-Kali-Linux/dp/1782163166/ Web Penetration Testing with Kali Linux
• http://www.amazon.com/Web-Application-Security-Beginners-Guide/dp/0071776168/ Web Application Security, A Beginner’s Guide
• https://www.crypto101.io/ – Crypto 101 is an introductory course on cryptography
• http://www.offensive-security.com/metasploit-unleashed/ – Metasploit Unleashed
• http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/book.html – Security Engineering
• https://www.feistyduck.com/library/openssl-cookbook/ – OpenSSL Cookbook

Documentation

• https://www.owasp.org/ – Open Web Application Pentesting tools & Project
• http://www.pentest-standard.org/ – Penetration Testing Execution Standard
• http://www.binary-auditing.com/ – Dr. Thorsten Schneider’s Binary Auditing

Tools

• http://www.metasploit.com/ – World’s most used penetration testing software
• http://www.arachni-scanner.com/ – Web Application Penetration Testing Scanner Framework
• https://github.com/sullo/nikto – Nikto web server scanner
• http://www.tenable.com/products/nessus-vulnerability-scanner – Nessus Vulnerability Scanner
• http://www.portswigger.net/burp/intruder.html – Burp Intruder is a Web Application Penetration Testing Tools for automating customized attacks against web apps.
• http://www.openvas.org/ – The world’s most advanced Open Source vulnerability scanner and manager.
• https://github.com/iSECPartners/Scout2 – Security auditing tool for AWS environments
• https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Category:OWASP_DirBuster_Project – Is a multi threaded java application designed to brute force directories and files names on web/application servers.
• https://www.owasp.org/index.php/ZAP – The Zed Attack Proxy is an easy-to-use integrated penetration testing tool for finding vulnerabilities in web applications.
• https://github.com/tecknicaltom/dsniff – dsniff is a collection of tools for network auditing and penetration testing.   * https://github.com/WangYihang/Webshell-Sniper – Manage your web shell via terminal.   * https://github.com/DanMcInerney/dnsspoof – DNS spoofer. Drops DNS responses from the router and replaces it with the spoofed DNS response
• https://github.com/trustedsec/social-engineer-toolkit – The Social-Engineer Toolkit (SET) repository from TrustedSec
• https://github.com/sqlmapproject/sqlmap – Automatic SQL injection and database takeover tool
• https://github.com/beefproject/beef – The Browser Exploitation Framework Project
• http://w3af.org/ – w3af is a Web Application Attack and Audit Framework
• https://github.com/espreto/wpsploit – WPSploit, Exploiting WordPress With Metasploit   * https://github.com/WangYihang/Reverse-Shell-Manager – Reverse shell manager via terminal.   * https://github.com/RUB-NDS/WS-Attacker – WS-Attacker is a modular framework for web services penetration testing
• https://github.com/wpscanteam/wpscan – WPScan is a black box WordPress vulnerability scanner
• http://sourceforge.net/projects/paros/ Paros proxy
• https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Category:OWASP_WebScarab_Project Web Scarab proxy
• https://code.google.com/p/skipfish/ Skipfish, an active Web Application Penetration Testing reconnaissance tool
• http://www.acunetix.com/vulnerability-scanner/ Acunetix Web Vulnerability Scanner
• http://www-03.ibm.com/software/products/en/appscan IBM Security AppScan
• https://www.netsparker.com/web-vulnerability-scanner/ Netsparker web vulnerability scanner
• http://www8.hp.com/us/en/software-solutions/webinspect-dynamic-analysis-dast/index.html HP Web Inspect
• https://github.com/sensepost/wikto Wikto – Nikto for Windows with some extra features
• http://samurai.inguardians.com Samurai Web Testing Framework
• https://code.google.com/p/ratproxy/ Ratproxy
• http://www.websecurify.com Websecurify
• http://sourceforge.net/projects/grendel/ Grendel-scan
• https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Category:OWASP_DirBuster_Project DirBuster
• http://www.edge-security.com/wfuzz.php Wfuzz
• http://wapiti.sourceforge.net wapiti
• https://github.com/neuroo/grabber Grabber
• https://subgraph.com/vega/ Vega
• http://websecuritytool.codeplex.com Watcher passive web scanner
• http://xss.codeplex.com x5s XSS and Unicode transformations security testing assistant
• http://www.beyondsecurity.com/avds AVDS Vulnerability Assessment and Management
• http://www.golismero.com Golismero
• http://www.ikare-monitoring.com IKare
• http://www.nstalker.com N-Stalker X
• https://www.rapid7.com/products/nexpose/index.jsp Nexpose
• http://www.rapid7.com/products/appspider/ App Spider
• http://www.milescan.com ParosPro
• https://www.qualys.com/enterprises/qualysguard/web-application-scanning/ Qualys Web Application Scanning
• http://www.beyondtrust.com/Products/RetinaNetworkSecurityScanner/ Retina
• https://www.owasp.org/index.php/OWASP_Xenotix_XSS_Exploit_Framework Xenotix XSS Exploit Framework
• https://github.com/future-architect/vuls Vulnerability scanner for Linux, agentless, written in golang.
• https://github.com/rastating/wordpress-exploit-framework A Ruby framework for developing and using modules that aid in the penetration testing of WordPress-powered websites and systems.
• http://www.xss-payloads.com/ XSS Payloads to leverage XSS vulnerabilities, build custom payloads, and practice penetration testing skills.
• https://github.com/joaomatosf/jexboss JBoss (and others Java Deserialization Vulnerabilities) verify and EXploitation Tool
• https://github.com/commixproject/commix Automated All-in-One OS command injection and exploitation tool
• https://github.com/pathetiq/BurpSmartBuster A Burp Suite content discovery plugin that adds the smart into the Buster!
• https://github.com/GoSecure/csp-auditor Burp and ZAP plugin to analyze CSP headers
• https://github.com/ffleming/timing_attack Perform timing attacks against web applications
• https://github.com/lalithr95/fuzzapi Fuzzapi is a tool used for REST API pentesting
• https://github.com/owtf/owtf Offensive Web Testing Framework (OWTF)
• https://github.com/nccgroup/wssip Application for capturing, modifying, and sending custom WebSocket data from client to server and vice versa.
• https://github.com/tijme/angularjs-csti-scanner Automated client-side template injection (sandbox escape/bypass) detection for AngularJS (ACSTIS).

Cheat Sheets

• http://n0p.net/penguicon/php_app_sec/mirror/xss.html – XSS cheatsheet
• https://highon.coffee/blog/lfi-cheat-sheet/ – LFI Cheat Sheet
• https://highon.coffee/blog/reverse-shell-cheat-sheet/ – Reverse Shell Cheat Sheet
• https://www.netsparker.com/blog/web-security/sql-injection-cheat-sheet/ – SQL Injection Cheat Sheet
• https://www.gracefulsecurity.com/path-traversal-cheat-sheet-windows/ – Path Traversal Cheat Sheet: Windows

Docker images for Penetration Testing

• docker pull kalilinux/kali-linux-docker official Kali Linux
• docker pull owasp/zap2docker-stable – official OWASP ZAP
• docker pull wpscanteam/wpscan – official WPScan
• docker pull pandrew/metasploit – docker-metasploit
• docker pull citizenstig/dvwa – Damn Vulnerable Web Application (DVWA)
• docker pull wpscanteam/vulnerablewordpress – Vulnerable WordPress Installation
• docker pull hmlio/vaas-cve-2014-6271 – Vulnerability as a service: Shellshock
• docker pull hmlio/vaas-cve-2014-0160 – Vulnerability as a service: Heartbleed
• docker pull opendns/security-ninjas – Security Ninjas
• docker pull usertaken/archlinux-pentest-lxde – Arch Linux Penetration Tester
• docker pull diogomonica/docker-bench-security – Docker Bench for Security
• docker pull ismisepaul/securityshepherd – OWASP Security Shepherd
• docker pull danmx/docker-owasp-webgoat – OWASP WebGoat Project docker image
• docker pull citizenstig/nowasp – OWASP Mutillidae II Web Pen-Test Practice Application

Vulnerabilities

• http://cve.mitre.org/ – Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures. The Standard for Information Security Vulnerability Names. Web Application Pentesting Tools.
• https://www.exploit-db.com/ – The Exploit Database – the ultimate archive of Exploits, Shellcode, and Security Papers.
• http://0day.today/ – Inj3ct0r is the ultimate database of exploits and vulnerabilities and a great resource for vulnerability researchers and security professionals.
• http://osvdb.org/ – OSVDB’s goal is to provide accurate, detailed, current, and unbiased technical security information.
• http://www.securityfocus.com/ – Since its inception in 1999, SecurityFocus has been a mainstay in the security community.
• http://packetstormsecurity.com/ – Global Security Resource
• https://wpvulndb.com/ – WPScan Vulnerability Database

Courses

• Best Source for learning Burp suite https://ethicalhackersacademy.com/collections/ethical-hackers-academy/products/learn-burp-web-penetration-testing
• You can find the best web application testing courses at https://ethicalhackersacademy.com/collections/ethical-hackers-academy/products/bug-bounty-web-hacking
• https://www.elearnsecurity.com/course/web_application_penetration_testing_extreme/ eLearnSecurity Web Application Penetration Testing eXtreme
• https://www.offensive-security.com/information-security-training/advanced-web-attack-and-exploitation/ Offensive Security Advanced Web Attacks and Exploitation (live)
• https://www.sans.org/course/web-app-penetration-testing-ethical-hacking Sans SEC542: Web App Penetration Testing and Ethical Hacking
• https://www.sans.org/course/advanced-web-app-penetration-testing-ethical-hacking Sans SEC642: Advanced Web Application Penetration Testing Tools and Ethical Hacking * http://opensecuritytraining.info/ – Open Security Training
• http://securitytrainings.net/security-trainings/ – Security Exploded Training
• http://www.cs.fsu.edu/~redwood/OffensiveComputerSecurity/ – FSU – Offensive Computer Security
• http://www.cs.fsu.edu/~lawrence/OffNetSec/ – FSU – Offensive Network Security
• http://www.securitytube.net/ – World’s largest Infosec and Hacking Portal.

Online Hacking Demonstration Sites

• http://testasp.vulnweb.com/ – Acunetix ASP test and demonstration site
• http://testaspnet.vulnweb.com/ – Acunetix ASP.Net test and demonstration site
• http://testphp.vulnweb.com/ – Acunetix PHP test and demonstration site
• http://crackme.cenzic.com/kelev/view/home.php – Crack Me Bank
• http://zero.webappsecurity.com/ – Zero Bank
• http://demo.testfire.net/ – Altoro Mutual

Labs

• http://www.cis.syr.edu/~wedu/seed/all_labs.html – Developing Instructional Laboratories for Computer SEcurity EDucation
• https://www.vulnhub.com/ – Virtual Machines for Localhost Penetration Testing.
• https://pentesterlab.com/ – PentesterLab is an easy and great way to learn penetration testing.
• https://github.com/jerryhoff/WebGoat.NET – This Web Application Pentesting Tools platform is a learning platform about common web security flaws.
• http://www.dvwa.co.uk/ – Damn Vulnerable Web Application (DVWA)
• http://sourceforge.net/projects/lampsecurity/ – LAMPSecurity Training
• https://github.com/Audi-1/sqli-labs – SQLI labs to test error-based, Blind boolean-based, and Time-based.
• https://github.com/paralax/lfi-labs – a small set of PHP scripts to practice exploiting LFI, RFI, and CMD injection vulns
• https://hack.me/ – Build, host and share vulnerable web apps in a sandboxed environment for free
• http://azcwr.org/az-cyber-warfare-ranges – Free live fire Capture the Flag, blue team, red team Cyber Warfare Range for beginners through advanced users. Must use a cell phone to send a text message requesting access to the range.
• https://github.com/adamdoupe/WackoPicko – WackoPicko is a vulnerable web application used to test Web Application Pentesting Tools for scanners.
• https://github.com/rapid7/hackazon – Hackazon is a free, vulnerable test site that is an online storefront built with the same technologies used in today’s rich client and mobile applications.

SSL

• https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/index.html – This service performs a deep analysis of the configuration of any SSL web server on the public Internet.
• https://raymii.org/s/tutorials/Strong_SSL_Security_On_nginx.html – Strong SSL Security on nginx
• https://weakdh.org/ – Weak Diffie-Hellman and the Logjam Attack
• https://letsencrypt.org/ – Let’s Encrypt is a new Certificate Authority: It’s free, automated, and open.
• https://filippo.io/Heartbleed/ – A checker (site and tool) for CVE-2014-0160 (Heartbleed).

Security Ruby on Rails

• http://brakemanscanner.org/ – A static analysis security vulnerability scanner and Web Application Security Tools for Ruby on Rails applications.
• https://github.com/rubysec/ruby-advisory-db – A database of vulnerable Ruby Gems
• https://github.com/rubysec/bundler-audit – Patch-level verification for Bundler
• https://github.com/hakirisec/hakiri_toolbelt – Hakiri Toolbelt is a command line interface for the Hakiri platform.
• https://hakiri.io/facets – Scan Gemfile.lock for vulnerabilities.
• http://rails-sqli.org/ – This page lists many query methods and options in ActiveRecord that do not sanitize raw SQL arguments and are not intended to be called with unsafe user input.
• https://github.com/0xsauby/yasuo – A ruby script that scans for vulnerable & exploitable 3rd-party web applications on a network

Conclusion

Web application pentesting tools are very essential to perform penetration testing over various web-based applications to find security flaws and protect the application from cyber criminals.

There are various pentesting Tools available, above mentioned web application pen-testing Tools are top list to perform various levels of pentesting operation and report to the respective vendor to patch the web application vulnerabilities.