What is WebInspect ?

WebInspect is a web application security scanning tool offered by HP.

It helps the security professionals to assess the potential security flaws in the web application.

WebInspect is basically a dynamic black box testing tool which detects the vulnerabilities by actually performing the attack.

After initiating the scan on a web application, there are assessment agents that work on different areas of the application.

They report their results to security engine which evaluates the results.

It uses Audit engines to attack the application and determine the vulnerabilities.

At the end of the scan you can generate a report called ‘Vulnerability Assessment Report’ which would list the security issues in desired format.

Using this report, client can fix the issues and then go for validation scanning to confirm the same.

HP WebInspect is a commercial tool and you need license to scan a web site.

With the trail version you will be permitted to scan only zero.webappsecurity.com (HP demo site).

So WebInspect basically comes into picture when the application is hosted in some environment (test/QA/production).

As with every other tool there are both advantages and disadvantages associated with using WebInspect.
  Advantages:

  Saves time when dealing with large enterprise applications

Simulates the attack, shows the results and presents you with a comprehensive view.

It is not dependent on the underlying language.

  Disadvantages:

  It’s hard for any tool to find logical flaws, weak cryptographic storage, severity of the disclosed information etc.

It has a list of payloads that it uses on every web application.

It does not use any wisdom in generating payloads depending on the type of application.

There could be false positives among the listed vulnerabilities.
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