Vulnerability Scanner
Celena Sessler
The web vulnerability scanner behind Burp Suite's popularity has more to it than most. Burp Scanner uses PortSwigger's world-leading research to help its users find a wide range of vulnerabilities in web applications, automatically.
Burp Scanner's crawl engine cuts through obstacles like CSRF tokens, stateful functionality, and overloaded or volatile URLs like they aren't even there. And with its embedded Chromium browser, it will render and crawl even the JavaScript-heavy applications other web vulnerability scanners struggle with.
Burp Scanner saves a huge amount of time and wasted effort. The architecture of modern web applications can create sinkholes that will eat up requests if your web vulnerability scanner isn't prepared. Burp Scanner uses location fingerprinting techniques to identify these areas - dramatically cutting down the number of requests made while testing.
Automated OAST (out-of-band application security testing) was pioneered by PortSwigger. Burp Collaborator identifies interactions between its target and an external server. This allows it to check for bugs invisible to conventional scanners - including asynchronous SQL injection and blind SSRF. Results then appear as standard in Burp Scanner's reports.
Given that Burp Scanner detects the latest web vulnerability types, discovered by PortSwigger Research, eTrends s.r.o. said that it has been critical to their ability to catch vulnerabilities that theycannot with other tools.Source: TechValidate survey of PortSwigger customers
Has anyone found the huge danger with the vulnerability scanner? I sent my son off to Oxford University with McAfee Livesafe I thought protecting his computer. All the automatic updates were on - including the vulnerability scanner.
The vulnerability scanner doesn't even keep a log of what it's done (according to McAfee "Tech support"), so there is no way of checking apart from the update time stamps on the software it has updated.
In the old days of monolithic on-premise applications, vulnerability scanners were deployed primarily in the production environment as infrastructure watchdogs that alerted to runtime threats. This paradigm became obsolete with the emergence of cloud-native applications that leverage the powerful scalability and agility of modern cloud-based infrastructure. As applications and the tools to secure them become more complex, solutions like ASPM are emerging to bring together the different data streams and enable risk based prioritization and remediation.
In this article, we describe the different kinds of vulnerability scanners that, together, provide cloud-native security coverage for websites, web applications, networks, open-source code, WordPress content, and containers (such as our Docker scanner).
A vulnerability scanner is an automated vulnerability testing tool that monitors for misconfigurations or coding flaws that pose cybersecurity threats. Vulnerability scanners either rely on a database of known vulnerabilities or probe for common flaw types to discover unknown vulnerabilities. The scanner logs detect vulnerabilities and sometimes assign a risk score.
Web vulnerability scanners scan application/website code to find vulnerabilities that compromise the application/website itself or its back-end services. They are an essential component of application security testing.
When it comes to web applications, the only effective vulnerability management strategy is to adopt a shift-left DevSecOps approach and deploy scanners throughout a secure SDLC (software development life cycle). This battery of scanners includes static application security tools (SAST) that automatically scan uncompiled code for vulnerabilities, and dynamic application security tools (DAST) that automatically scan compiled code across all environments from testing to production.
Another important tool is penetration testing, which essentially simulates hackers in order to discover if a web application or website is vulnerable to malicious exploits. There are even website vulnerability scanner online services that conduct third-party penetration testing.
Seeing that using components with known vulnerabilities is one of the OWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities, organizations must ensure that they are using a state-of-the-art open-source vulnerability scanner. The advantages of the Snyk open-source vulnerability scanner include:
The good news is that there are many commercial and free vulnerability scanners available on the market today. However the flip side to that is that having so many options can make it difficult to evaluate which scanner stack is optimal for your requirements.
Once you have created a short list of vulnerability scanners, you can try them out. Even the commercial vulnerability scanners offer free trials so that you can kick the tires before making a final decision. Given the diverse set of vulnerability scanners that you will have to deploy in order to achieve end-to-end coverage across all your environments, you may also want to consider a vulnerability management platform that knows how to integrate with all your scanners and correlate their outputs into a single source of vulnerability management truth.
Vulnerability scanning is the essential front end of any vulnerability management program. Today, vulnerability management is no longer a nice-to-have but rather a business-critical requirement for any organization running web applications or interactive websites. These kinds of public-facing assets are common attack vectors for malicious actors seeking unauthorized access to systems and data.
Vulnerability scans (vulscans) play a critical role in protecting assets from attacker exploitation by identifying missing updates, misconfigurations, and other common security issues. Originally designed to test local networks and devices, vulnerability scanning tools have evolved to encompass the modern IT environment, including the internet of things (IoT), operational technology (OT), websites, applications, cloud resources, and containers.
A table summarizing our top 8 vulscan tools can be found below, followed by in-depth reviews of each tool. We also include sections on our methodology and tips for selecting and effectively using vulnerability scanning tools.
Website and application vulnerability scanning tools apply specialized algorithms to search for programming vulnerabilities such as cross-site scripting (XSS) and SQL injection (SQLi) exposures. Invicti, formerly known as Netsparker, is a popular application vulnerability scanner designed for enterprise-scale and automation with industry-leading detection capabilities and false-positive rates.
Developed originally for Linux, the Nmap Security Scanner supports binary packages for Windows, macOS, and Linux. Nmap uses IP packets as a port scanner to determine what hosts, services, and operating systems are available from a device. Penetration testers and IT teams value nmap as a quick, effective, and light-weight tool to list open ports on a system and perform scripted vulnerability scans.
Nmap provides powerful port scanning and vulnerability scanning capabilities through built-in and scripted capabilities. IT teams with coding capabilities can create a powerful vulnerability scanning tool using Nmap capabilities with their time consisting of the only significant investment for deployment.
Before Tenable stopped offering the open-source Nessus tool, developers forked the code and created the OpenVAS (Open Vulnerability Assessment Scanner) tool. Greenbone Networks began supporting development of this open-source tool in 2006. Although developed as a Unix/Linux scanner, OpenVAS can scan for a broader range of vulnerabilities, including Windows OS vulnerabilities.
RapidFire Tools does not post pricing, but instead requests that interested customers fill out a form for a quote. Customers have reported prices in the range of $500 per scanner for a multi-year commitment.
Founded by DevOps engineers for DevOps engineers who write and push out code every day, StackHawk seeks to simplify the process of building secure software. Their DAST scanner integrates with CI/CD Automation and Slack to help triage findings and enable rapid correction.
Tenable.io builds off of the popular Nessus tool to provide vulnerability scanning capabilities for more than 47,000 unique IT, IoT, OT, operating systems, and applications. The tool integrates with the broader Tenable One platform, which includes vulnerability management and web app scanning as well as the tenable.sc security center. Tenable conducts regular research and discovers zero-day vulnerabilities that it adds to the tool for early detection.
To be included, tools needed to be primarily vulnerability scanning tools so penetration testing, asset management, patch management, vulnerability management, vulnerability management as a service, or security tools (endpoint, network, etc.) that include a vulnerability scanning function were not generally included. We assume the readers are looking for specific tools for vulnerability scanning and we have published other articles on those topics.
Different vulnerability scanning tools will have different priorities and capabilities. A typical organization will need to use several different vulnerability scanning tools to obtain a complete picture of their environment.
An organization should absolutely use multiple scanning tools. In some cases, an organization can purchase multiple tools from the same vendor, such as a cloud module and a network module from one of the Enterprise Vulnerability Scanning tool options. Other times, an organization may pick up a network scanner suitable for small businesses and complement it with open source tools for port and application vulnerability scanning.
The security of any organization depends on this process of identifying vulnerabilities and resolving them before attackers can exploit them. Conducting a vulnerability scan generates a vulnerability list that must be validated, prioritized, and addressed. A vulnerability management tool or an effective IT or security ticketing tool needs to be deployed to track the progress of the teams addressing the vulnerabilities.
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