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Exploring Effective Application Testing Tools And Techniques

Mar 09, 2006 •

Anthony Pell

1 min read

Topics Covered

testing methods security tools application testing web applications manual testing automated testing

Web application security is interesting to test, in particular because, unlike most network and operating system testing, most web applications are custom-built. Even when they’re not custom-built, there’s enough diversity out there that simply looking for known problems isn’t good enough. You need to review the application itself.

At one of my previous employers, we had a good system for reviewing all web applications with a couple of commercial scanner tools; applications could not be deployed into production until the results of those scans were acceptable. Application scanners do not, of course, catch everything — there are always esoteric conditions that are easily missed in automated tests. Manual testing has an important place in assessments. Automated testing, though, does have a number of advantages.

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