14 Best Security Testing Tools (December 2024 Update)

As a Software Tester of many years, I am always keen to test out new Software Testing Tools that can help me build awesome websites. I am so excited to bring these commercial and open-source security testing tools before you through this post.

Note: You should only use these Security Testing Tools to attack an application that you have permission to test.

In this post, we are going to see the following:

Recommended Best Application Security Testing Tools

Tool Name	Logo	Best for	Link
Invicti		all web application security needs	Learn more
Acunetix		securing your websites, web applications as well as APIs	Learn more

What is Security Testing?

Security testing is a process to determine whether the system protects data and maintains functionality as intended. Penetration testing or pen testing is also a type of Security testing which is performed to evaluate the security of the system (hardware, software, networks or an information system environment).

We can do security testing using both manual and automated security testing tools and techniques. Security testing reviews the existing system to find vulnerabilities.

Most of the companies perform security testing on newly deployed or developed software, hardware, and network or information system environment. But it’s highly recommended by experts to make security testing as a part of information system audit process of an existing information system environment.

Must Read: Security Testing – Complete Guide

To find the flaws and vulnerabilities in a web application, there are many free, paid, and open source security testing tools available in the market. We know that the advantage of open source tools are we can easily customize it to match our requirements. We are here to showcase some of the top __ open source security testing tools.

We use security testing tools for checking how secure a website or web application is.

Security tests include testing for vulnerabilities such as SQL Injection, Cross-Site Scripting (XSS), Session Management, Broken Authentication, Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF), Security Misconfiguration, Failure to Restrict URL Access etc.,

Website hacking is quite common nowadays. Every now and then there is some news regarding a website being hacked or data breach. Infosec (information security) has come a long way and in the same way, hacking too. To keep a website safe from hackers we need to build secure websites to stay away from hackers. Web Security Testing Tools act proactively in detecting web application vulnerabilities and safeguarding websites against attacks. There are many paid and free web application testing tools available in the market. Here, we discuss the top 14 open source security testing tools for web applications.

Best Security Testing Tools for Web Applications

Here are some of the Commercial and Open Source Security Testing Tools which are popular among Security Testers.

Keep reading to see our in-depth analysis.

#1. Invicti

Invicti is a web vulnerability management system. It is an automatic, deadly accurate, and easy-to-use web application security scanner. It is used to automatically identify security issues such as Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) and in websites, web applications, and web services.

Its Proof-based Scanning technology doesn’t just report vulnerabilities, it also produces a Proof of Concept to confirm they are not false positives. So there is no point in wasting your time manually verifying the identified vulnerabilities after a scan is finished.

Some of the features of Invicti are as follows

Vulnerability assessment
Advanced web scanning
Proof-based scanning technology for dead-accurate vulnerability detection and scan results
Full HTML5 support
Web services scanning
HTTP request builder
SDLC integration
Reporting
Exploitation
Manual testing
Anti-CSRF (Cross-site Request Forgery) token support
Automatic detection of custom 404 error pages
REST API support
Anti-CSRF token support

Download Invicti

#2. Acunetix

Acunetix is an easy yet powerful solution to secure your website, web applications and APIs. It detects over 4500 web vulnerabilities such as Cross Site Scripting (XSS), SQL injection, etc.,

Don’t miss our detailed review on Acunetix

Its DeepScan Crawler scans HTML5 websites and AJAX-heavy client-side SPAs. It allows users to export discovered vulnerabilities to issue trackers such as Atlassian JIRA, GitHub. It runs on Windows, Linux, and Online.

Some of the features of Acunetix are as follows

In-depth crawl and analysis – automatically scans all websites
The highest detection rate of vulnerabilities with low false positives
Integrated vulnerability management – prioritize and control threats
It can be integrated with defect trackers such as JIRA, Bugzilla, or Mantis.
Free network security scanning and Manual Testing tools
Supported platforms Windows, Linux, and macOS

Download Acunetix

#3. Zed Attack Proxy (ZAP)

Zed Attack Proxy popularly known as ZAP is an open source security testing tool for a web application which was developed by OWASP (Open Web Application Security Project). It runs on all operating systems that support Java 8. It is one of the world’s most popular free security tools and is actively maintained by volunteers. It is an easy to use integrated penetration testing tool for finding a number of security vulnerabilities in a web application while we are developing and testing an application. It is also a great tool for experienced pentesters to use for manual security testing. 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 as well as experienced security professionals. It comes with a friendly GUI which helps newbies as well as experts. It gives command line access for advanced users.

ZAP has a huge reputation amongst Security Testing Tools as being easy to use, and powerful.

Highlights:

Easy to use
Easy to install
Free, Open source
Cross-platform
Internationalized

Key features of ZAP are:

Automatic scanning
Rest-based API
Intercepting proxy
Authentication Support
Ajax Spider
Dynamic SSL Certificates
SQL Injection
XXS Injection
Forced Browsing
Fuzzing
Web Socket Support
Active and Passive scanners
Cookie-based and HTTP authentication session management
Anti CSRF token handling

Download Zed Attack Proxy

#4. Wfuzz

Wfuzz is a web application security fuzzer tool which is developed in Python. It doesn’t come with GUI Interface, so security testers who want to use this tool have to work on command line interface. This tool is designed for bruteforcing web applications.

Key features of Wfuzz are:

Multiple injection points with multiple dictionaries
Post, headers and authentication data brute forcing
Output to HTML
Cookies fuzzing
Multithreading
Proxy Support
SOCK Support
Time delays between requests
Authentication Support (NTLM, Basic)
All parameters bruteforcing (POST and GET)
Multiple encoders per payload
Baseline request (to filter results against)
Brute force HTTP methods
Multiple proxy support (each request through a different proxy)
HEAD scan (faster for resource discovery)

Website Link: http://www.edge-security.com/wfuzz.php

Download Wfuzz

#5. Wapiti

Wapiti is a web application vulnerability scanner. It allows us to audit the security of websites or web applications. It performs black box scans of the web application by crawling the web pages of the deployed webapp, looking for scripts and forms where it can inject data. Once it gets the list of URLs, forms and their inputs, Wapiti acts like fuzzer, injecting payloads to see if a script is vulnerable. This open source security testing tool supports both GET and POST HTTP attack methods. It is a command line application. It doesn’t come with GUI. So it is important to have a knowledge of various commands of Wapiti. There is detailed documentation on Wapiti official site.

It detects vulnerabilities like

File disclosure
Data injection
XSS (Cross Site Scripting) injection
XXE (XML External Entity) injection
CRLF injection
SSRF(Server Side Request Forgery)
Bypass weak .htaccess configurations
Shell shock (aka Bash Bug)

Key features of Wapiti web vulnerability scanner are:

Supports both GET and POST HTTP methods for attacks
Acts like a fuzzer

Website Link: http://wapiti.sourceforge.net/

Download Wapiti

#6. W3af

W3af is a web application attack and audit framework that is developed using python. It is one of the most popular web application security testing frameworks in the market. It comes with both GUI and console interface. It helps developers and penetration testers identify and exploit vulnerabilities in web applications. It supports authentication types such as HTTP basic authentication, NTLM authentication, Form authentication, Cookie authentication. It is able to identify more than 200 types of security issues in web applications, including

Cross-Site Scripting
SQL Injection
Guessable credentials
Unhandled application errors
PHP misconfigurations
Blind SQL injections
Buffer overflow vulnerability
CORS (Cross-Origin Resource Sharing)
CSRF (Cross Site Request Forgeries) vulnerabilities
OS Commanding
Authentication support

Website Link: http://w3af.org/

Download w3af

#7. Vega

Vega is a free and open source web security scanner and web security testing platform to test the security of web applications. It is written in Java and has a well designed graphical user interface (GUI) runs on Linux, OS X, and Windows.

It exposes vulnerabilities including

Find and validate SQL injection
Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) injection
Blind SQL injection
Header injection
Remote file include
Shell injection

Website Link: https://subgraph.com/vega/

Download Vega

#8. SQLMap

SQLMap is an open source penetration testing tool. It allows us to automate the process of detecting and exploiting SQL injection vulnerabilities in a website’s database. It comes with a powerful detection engine and many features to detect vulnerabilities.

It supports 6 types of SQL Injection techniques:

Boolean-based blind
Time-based blind
Error-based
Union query-based
Stacked queries
Out-of-band

It supports a large number of database services such as

MySQL
Oracle
PostgreSQL
Microsoft SQL Server
Microsoft Access
IBM DB2
SQLite
Firebird
Sybase
SAP
MaxDB
Informix
HSQLDB
H2

Website Link: http://sqlmap.org/

Download SQLMap

#9. SonarQube

SonarQube is an open source security testing tool developed by SonarSource. It is an automatic code review tool to detect bugs, vulnerabilities and code smells in your code.

Key features of SonarQube are

Continuous inspection
Detect Tricky issues
Multi-Language support
DevOps Integration
Centralize Quality

Website Link: https://www.sonarqube.org/

Download SonarQube

#10. Nogotofail

Nogotofail is a network security testing tool (network vulnerability scanner tool) designed to help developers and penetration testers. As a network security scanner, it includes testing for common SSL certificate verification issues, HTTPS and TLS/SSL library bugs, SSL and STARTTLS stripping issues, cleartext issues, and more.

Vulnerabilities exposed by Nogotofail network testing tool are

SSL Injection
TLS Injection
SSL Certificate verification issues
SSL and STARTTLS stripping issues
Cleartext issues

Website Link: https://security.googleblog.com/2014/11/introducing-nogotofaila-network-traffic.html

Download Nogotofail

#11. Grabber

Grabber is an open source web application scanner that detects some kind of vulnerabilities in a website or web applications. It is designed to scan small websites such as forums and personal websites. It is absolutely not for big application. It will take a too long time and flood your network when you use it for a big application. It doesn’t come with GUI interface. It was developed in Python.

Grabber can identify the following issues:

Cross-site scripting
SQL injection
File inclusion
Backup files check
Simple AJAX check
Hybrid analysis or Crystal ball testing for PHP application using PHP-SAT

Website Link: https://tools.kali.org/web-applications/grabber

Download Grabber

#12. Arachni

Arachni is an open source security testing tool aimed towards helping penetration testers and administrators evaluate the security of web applications. It is a feature-full, modular, high-performance Ruby framework. It supports all major operating systems such as MS Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. It is designed to identify security issues within a web application and make it hacker proof.

Arachni can identify the following issues:

Local file inclusion
Remote file inclusion
Invalidated redirects
Invalidated DOM redirects
XPath injection
SQL injection
XSS injection

Website Link: http://www.arachni-scanner.com/

Download Arachni

#13. Skipfish

Skipfish is an active web application security testing tool. It prepares an interactive sitemap for the targeted site by carrying out a recursive crawl and dictionary-based probes. It is available for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows.

Some of the security checks offered by Skipfish are:

Server-side query injection
Explicit SQL-like syntax in GET or POST parameters
Server-side shell command injection
Server-side XML/XPath injection
Password forms submitting from or to non-SSL pages
Incorrect or missing MIME types on renderable

Website Link: https://tools.kali.org/web-applications/skipfish

Download Skipfish

#14. Ratproxy

Ratproxy is an open source security testing tool. It is a semi-automated, largely passive web application security audit tool. Ratproxy assessments take little bandwidth or time to run and proceed in an intuitive, distraction-free manner. It affords a consistent and predictable coverage of user-accessible features. It is supported by all popular operating systems such as Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux.

Website Link: https://sectools.org/tool/ratproxy/

Download Ratproxy

Conclusion

We tried our best to bring la ist of top 14 commercial and open source Security Testing Tools for web application (vulnerability scanning tools/vulnerability assessment tools) for Web applications. Which is your favorite security testing tool? Tell us in the comments. If you feel I forgot to mention any of your favorite tools, let us know in the comments below. We will try to include it in our list and update this post.

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