6 Best Security Tools And Applications For Web Developers
The websites of today are no more static and are in fact way more dynamic than the ones belonging to the past. Even the simplest websites of today are made with CMS developing systems or there are some third party plugins involved in the development. The bad thing is that with these additional plugins or services we do not get much control as these belong to other parties. Even if an entire website is manually coded through a web designer then still we cannot trust the website and in fact, considering a website safe would be a big fallacy.
In order to make sure that a website is secure and safe it is important that we run a few tests over the website which would confirm its security. Here in this article you would get to know about some really good yet free security tools and applications which would help web developers like you to assess a website on the security parameters.
1) Websecurify
Websecurify is a very user friendly open source web testing tool which can automatically detect any threats and vulnerabilities related to any website on the fly. It has various advanced features and technologies which would help the developer to find out any bugs or security breaches within a website. This tool also comes with an add-on support so it gives it even more diversity on usage terms.
2) Wapiti
Wapiti is another web based open source security tool which would scan all the pages of a website automatically and look for forms and scripts where it can put the data. This tools works on Python language and thus it can easily detect errors and bugs which are associated with the database, file handling, command execution etc. This tool could be used for free by the designer.
3) Skipfish
Skipfish is a fully automated website testing tool which is not only very powerful and also very light weight which makes it very fast to be used. This tool has additional features like automatic learning abilities and form autocompletion. There are multiple security checks associated with Skipfish which you can use and these checks help to detect blind injection vectors and other relevant flaws and bugs.
4) Watcher
Watcher is actually a plugin for Fiddler which is a great HTTP debugging tool. Watcher works as an analysis tool for those applications which are HTTP based. The best thing about this plugin is that it runs silently in the background and it can also interact with various web applications to apply more then 30 tests. Watcher can also easily detect issues like context switching amid HTTPS and HTTP etc.
5) X5x
This is also another good plugin for Fiddler and just like Watcher this one is also designed to check out the encoding and the transformation issued which can give a boost to the XSS security breaching. It takes the input fed by the user through characters like <,> etc and sees how this input is transformed into the output characters.
6) Netsparker
Even though there is a paid version of Netsparker you can also get the free version which is pretty good as well. There are some really amazing features in it which include SQL Injection detection and that if cross site scripting issues. You can also check the HTTP request/response working.
So, there were some really good tools with the help of which you can assess the security of your website. If you have additional knowledge of web threat detection services then you could even make a better use of all these tools.
