Best Tools for Secure Web Development

According to an analysis of seven million websites, websites experience at least 94 cyber attacks every day. The same report stated that bots visit websites an average of 2,608 times every week.

These numbers are a reminder that web security must be a priority. It all starts at the inception stage and should be implemented at every stage of web development.

What Is Web Development Security?

Web development security protects a website from cyber breaches, such as unauthorized access, use, modification, disruption, and destruction.

Effective website security begins at the design stage. Developers must consider the most secure configuration of the web server and web application. Organizational policies, such as how passwords for team members and employees are created and renewed, also matter.

Web owners must establish internal and external security systems—cyber attacks can happen on either. The internal system or intranet is where the company database is stored, and it contains sensitive files and client information. The external security system refers to implemented measures to protect against incoming online communications.

When designing and developing a website, you must have the best security tools in your arsenal.

Top 10 Website Security Tools

It’s not a debate—website security is critical for any organization, no matter the niche or size. It entails protection for the entire company, all its files, and the information of its employees and clients.

Robust security is also crucial for anyone who visits the company website. A security breach may cost a company millions of dollars in internal damages and a tarnished reputation that is difficult to repair.

The following tools can help ensure top-notch security for your website:

Sucuri

Recognizing emerging threats daily, Sucuri, founded in 2009, continues to innovate its security tools. The goal is to provide clients with safe and fast websites. Sucuri secures websites from its cloud-based platform, overseen and managed by experienced security analysts.

The tool is very simple to use, as you only need to enter your site’s URL into the system’s website. Sucuri will run a full audit on the front end and report its findings in just a few seconds. But that’s just a taste of what it can do. Paid plans provide malware and hack removals, post-cleanup basic reports, website application firewalls, and much more.

Zed Attack Proxy (ZAP)

Zed Attack Proxy was developed by the Open Web Application Security Project. It is ideal for testing websites, as it detects security vulnerabilities in web apps. It does so during the development and testing phases to ensure there are minimal to zero vulnerabilities once the website goes live.

ZAP also provides options for security automation and add-ons that are great for marketplaces or e-commerce sites. Because of its intuitive user interface, even inexperienced developers can easily leverage this tool.

Some of the things ZAP efficiently exposes are application error disclosure, SQL injection, XSS injection, and more.

Beagle Security

Beagle Security is an AI-driven security tool that works a bit differently than others on this list. Most systems look at vulnerabilities in web development security. However, Beagle uses web application penetration testing to appraise weaknesses in a site’s defense system. To do that, the tool simulates hacker or bot attacks to find ways to break through a site’s firewalls and security software.

When weaknesses are discovered, Beagle will guide organizations through better and more comprehensive security defense systems. Through such practice, the web development team can focus on improving the site’s functionality while Beagle helps strengthen the security aspect.

Arachni

For small businesses with a limited budget, the Arachni web application security tester is an excellent option. It is free to use and is efficient in penetration or development testing for simple websites. It has been around for over ten years, and while it has potential, its development hasn’t been the best, so many similar tools have surpassed it in popularity.

The open-source security testing tool will unearth SQL and XSS injections, local and remote file inclusion, and unvalidated redirects. When using Arachni, organizations will get a text-based report onscreen while running the system. It’s quite old school but still largely effective.

Detectify

Detectify takes pride in its 99.7% accurate vulnerability assessment with its complete external attack surface management platform. It provides advanced and in-depth assessments, which is also why it is pricier than many of its counterparts. Detectify also has a Surface Monitoring feature that covers public DNS footprint and fingerprints tech stack.

The platform has tapped ethical hackers to find business-critical vulnerabilities using a custom-built render and crawl system for in-depth findings. Smart page filters are activated to scan massive amounts of applications.

Detectify is ideal for large enterprises with massive digital footprints. Higher-tier benefits include exclusive single sign-on (SSO), application programming interface access, automatic domain verification, etc.

SQLMAP

Equipped with a powerful detection engine, SQLMAP is an open-source penetration testing tool with several niche features that many organizations will find valuable. As the name suggests, the tool automates the detection of SQL injection flaws. Because of this focus, it has also perfected testing and support of six techniques: Boolean-based blind, error-based, out-of-band, stacked queries, time-based blind, and UNION query.

Other niche features of the tool include full support to directly connect to the database minus the SQL injection and automatic recognition of password hash formats. The site may provide a channel to establish an out-of-band transmission control protocol (TCP) connection.

Duo

Minimal downtime and optimized productivity are the two mantras for Duo in securing websites. It provides security without sacrificing speed so that organizations can deploy products fast with multi-factor authentication (MFA), SSO, remote access, and access control. MFA is an effective mechanism that prevents hackers from successfully entering the system.

Duo provides multiple layers of defense against phishing and web-based attacks without constant authentication interruption. Most of the defense layers are invisible and accessed in just one step. Email, web traffic, and credential theft are all critical attack vectors included in Duo’s one-step security promotion.

The company’s two-factor authentication (2FA) application was recently awarded among the best 2FA apps by the New York Times Wirecutter.

SonarQube

Finding a security system that you can easily integrate into your website can be difficult. SonarQube provides organizations with high-quality security solutions and code quality that seamlessly merges into the enterprise environment. With this level of integration, SonarQube becomes self-managing, allowing developers to focus on functionality and operational processes. It is private, too, although there is a choice to be otherwise.

SonarQube is ideal for large enterprises with a multitude of assets. Organizations will receive comprehensive security reports, executive aggregation, and all-inclusive PDF reports that provide the big picture of security risks and software asset vulnerabilities. Even when projects use different languages, SonarQube can patch bugs efficiently.

Quttera

Quttera is great for website owners looking for vulnerabilities in their security systems and those who have already fallen victim to breaches. The ThreatSign feature of Quttera uses advanced AI programming to conduct in-depth detection of malware, spyware, and phishing attempts. It also has the capability to remove threats.

The tool has a sophisticated web-scanning engine with a reliable infrastructure that conducts tests to discover evolving web threats. It has a web application firewall to block malicious presence. Basic Quttera security is very affordable.

Wfuzz

Fuzzing is a common technique of inputting invalid or random data to test computer programs. Wfuzz, which Python developed, is among the more popular fuzzing tools in the industry that uses brute-forcing web applications. The tool can effectively discover LDAP, SQL, and XSS injections. Wfuzz is ideally used for the recon and hunting phases of website development.

Wfuzz is also great at discovering common web vulnerabilities like open redirects and insecure direct object references (IDORs). It’s simple, too, as you can simply place a “fuzz” keyword in the URL. It has customization and filtering options as well.

Conclusion

Internet users are taught to use the best VPN to ensure private and secure web browsing. However, organizations and website developers also need to ensure that they do their due diligence as they develop and launch their sites.

Web visitors must feel secure whenever they browse online. If not, the company’s reputation could be severely damaged, and it will have to spend millions on corrective efforts.