Web App Penetration Testing

Web applications are uniquely exposed by design. They must be accessible to users, which means they're accessible to attackers, and although the web server is protected by the firewall, the application must stay exposed. Additionally, the web app is also the primary gateway to your most sensitive data assets, from customer records to financial transactions. A penetration test uncovers vulnerabilities like logic flaws, authentication weaknesses, and access control gaps that automated tools miss, identifies them before an attacker does, satisfies compliance requirements such as PCI DSS, SOC 2, and ISO 27001, and gives your development team the specific guidance needed to fix them.

We use the OWASP Testing Guide as the foundation for our methodology, which covers the OWASP Top 10 as well as a broad range of common vulnerabilities. These include injection attacks (such as SQL injection), cross-site scripting (XSS), broken authentication, insecure access controls, misconfigurations, and flaws in application logic that attackers could exploit.

We test AI-integrated applications against the emerging threat landscape specific to LLMs, including the OWASP Top 10 for Large Language Models. This covers prompt injection (both direct and indirect), training data leakage, excessive agency where the model can take unintended actions, and insecure output handling where LLM responses are trusted without sanitization. We look at how your application constrains the model's behavior, what data it has access to, and whether an attacker can manipulate AI-driven features to bypass controls or extract sensitive information.

We test how your application interacts with third-party services such as payment processors, identity providers, partner APIs, and SaaS platforms focusing on the integration points within your control. This includes how your application sends and receives data, handles authentication tokens, validates responses, and fails when a third-party service behaves unexpectedly. We do not test the third-party's infrastructure itself (their terms of service typically prohibit this), but the boundaries where your code meets theirs are often where the most exploitable issues live.

Authorization testing is a core part of every engagement. During scoping, we work with you to identify all distinct user roles and permission levels, from unauthenticated visitors through to administrators. We then request test accounts for each role and systematically test for both vertical privilege escalation (a lower-privileged user accessing admin functionality) and horizontal privilege escalation (one user accessing another user's data at the same privilege level). The more thoroughly we map your role hierarchy upfront, the more effective this testing becomes.

We can test against either, depending on your risk tolerance and requirements. Ideally, we test against a staging environment that closely mirrors production, such as the same codebase, same configurations, and same data structure, so we get realistic results without risking disruption to live users or data. When production testing is necessary (for example, to validate findings against real infrastructure or when a true staging equivalent doesn't exist), we coordinate timing and safeguards with your team to minimize impact. We'll work with you during scoping to determine the right approach.

A typical web application test takes two to three weeks of active testing, depending on the size and complexity of the application. To get started, we'll need a defined scope (the URLs, environments, and functionality to be tested), test accounts for each user role, access to the target environment, and a technical point of contact on your team. We handle all of this during a scoping call so there are no surprises on either side once testing begins.

Web applications should be tested after major updates, new feature releases, infrastructure changes, or when integrating new third-party services. Compliance frameworks such as PCI DSS, SOC 2, and ISO 27001 may also dictate testing frequency. If no major changes occur, you should still test at least annually to ensure new vulnerabilities have not been introduced.

Very. Every finding includes a clear description of the vulnerability, step-by-step reproduction instructions, evidence (such as screenshots and request/response captures), a risk rating based on both likelihood and business impact, and specific remediation guidance tailored to your technology stack. We don't hand you a generic scanner report and our recommendations are actionable enough for your development team to implement fixes without guesswork. We also offer a remediation verification retest so you can confirm the issues are resolved.