Web Application Penetration Testing
We test your web application the way attackers do. Not the way compliance checklists say to.
Web Applications Are Where Attackers Go First
Web apps are the front door, the API gateway, and the data pipeline all in one. They handle customer data, payments, internal workflows, and most of the connections to everything else. Every release widens the attack surface, and every framework upgrade introduces new ways to break it.
SOURCES: VERIZON DBIR 2025, IBM COST OF A DATA BREACH 2025, CROWDSTRIKE GLOBAL THREAT REPORT 2025
What Sets Our Web Application Testing Apart
Most web app pentests are a wrapper around an automated scanner. Ours start where scanners stop. Our engineers go after the flaws automation can’t reason about, the chains it can’t follow, and the assumptions your developers didn’t realize they were making.
OWASP Top 10 Coverage
Every Raxis engagement covers the full OWASP Top 10 (2021), from broken access control and injection to insecure design, vulnerable components, and SSRF. Coverage is the floor, not the ceiling.
Business Logic Exploitation
Logic flaws are vulnerabilities scanners can’t see. Coupon stacking, multi-step workflow bypasses, race conditions in checkout, privilege escalation through state manipulation. We map the application’s intent, then find the gaps between intent and implementation.
Comprehensive Role-Based Testing
Most vulnerabilities live at the boundaries between user roles. We test from every angle your users (and attackers) will hit your application from.
Unauthenticated
We hunt for flaws in the login, registration, and password recovery flows. SQL injection, authentication bypass, session fixation, and the endpoints developers forgot to lock down.
Standard User
Logged in with limited permissions, we attempt operations that should only be available to higher-privileged users. Vertical privilege escalation, IDOR, missing authorization checks.
Administrative User
With full access, we map the application end to end and look for technical vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and business logic gaps that admins can exploit (deliberately or accidentally) to break the system.
Cross-Tenant (Multi-Customer SaaS)
For SaaS applications, we validate that one customer’s session, token, or input can’t reach another customer’s data. Tenant boundary failures are quiet, and they’re devastating when they go public.
Vulnerabilities We Test For
Every Raxis engagement covers the full OWASP Top 10:2025, the current edition of the industry’s most-referenced application security risk framework. We test the categories that show up in real breaches, then we test the categories that don’t yet show up in scanner data but will.
Broken Access Control
The most prevalent category in OWASP’s data, year after year. We test horizontal and vertical privilege escalation, IDOR, forced browsing, missing authorization checks, and JWT manipulation. Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF) was consolidated into this category in the 2025 edition, so we also test for coerced server-side requests to internal services, cloud metadata endpoints, and attacker-controlled destinations.
Security Misconfiguration
Jumped from #5 in 2021 to #2 in 2025, the largest position move in the new edition. Cloud-native architectures and infrastructure-as-code have made misconfiguration the dominant attack surface. We test for default credentials, exposed admin panels, verbose error messages, missing security headers, overly permissive cloud storage, and the small misconfigurations that compound into a real attack path.
Software Supply Chain Failures
New in 2025. Expands the old “Vulnerable and Outdated Components” category beyond known CVEs to cover compromised dependencies, malicious packages, dependency confusion, typosquatting, build-pipeline tampering, and SBOM gaps. We identify exploitable supply chain exposures in your application’s actual context, not just what’s flagged in your dependency tree.
Cryptographic Failures
Weak or improper cryptography, plaintext storage of sensitive fields, weak TLS configurations, predictable tokens, and broken key management. We test what your application protects, how it protects it, and where the protection breaks down.
Injection
SQL injection, NoSQL injection, command injection, LDAP injection, and cross-site scripting (XSS), consolidated into this category in 2021 and unchanged in 2025. We test parameterization, sanitization, and the trust your application gives to user input.
Insecure Design
Architectural flaws no amount of code-level patching can fix. Missing rate limits, abusable workflows, trust boundaries that shouldn’t exist, and threat models that were never built. We test the application your developers thought they built against the application that actually shipped.
Authentication Failures
Renamed from “Identification and Authentication Failures” in 2025. Credential stuffing exposure, weak password policies, broken MFA enrollment, predictable session IDs, missing brute-force protection, and password reset flows that leak data or accept attacker-controlled inputs.
Software or Data Integrity Failures
Insecure deserialization, unsigned updates, untrusted CI/CD pipelines, inclusion of third-party scripts without integrity validation, and data integrity assumptions that fall apart when challenged. The 2025 rename (“or” instead of “and”) acknowledges these are independent failure modes, often exploited separately.
Security Logging and Alerting Failures
Renamed from “Logging and Monitoring” in 2025 to emphasize alerting (great logs with no alerts catch nothing in real time). We probe for the gaps in your detection coverage, the events your application doesn’t log, the alerts that don’t fire, and the attack patterns that go unnoticed because nobody’s watching.
Mishandling of Exceptional Conditions
New category in 2025. Covers what happens when applications hit unexpected states: error conditions, edge cases, timeouts, race conditions. The classic pattern is code that enforces access control on the happy path but fails open in error conditions. We test fault paths, exception handling, and the assumptions your application makes when something goes wrong.
Beyond the OWASP Top 10
Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF, removed from the Top 10 in 2017 but still common), business logic errors that scanners can’t reason about, complex multi-step workflow abuse, and API-specific abuse patterns covered separately by the OWASP API Security Top 10.
We test the named list, and we test what isn’t on it.
How We Test
Guided by the OWASP Web Security Testing Guide (WSTG) and grounded in MITRE ATT&CK. Manual exploitation backed by automated reconnaissance, tuned to your application’s actual surface.
What You Receive
Every Raxis web application engagement delivers more than a PDF.
Raxis Hack Stories
Our stories are based on real events encountered by Raxis engineers; however, some details have been altered or omitted to protect our customers’ identities.
How a Single Quote Dumped an Entire E-Commerce Database
While running through our usual array of unauthenticated web app checks, our pentester discovered that a small e-commerce site’s login prompt allowed CTF-like SQL injection. Emboldened by this success, he successfully accessed multiple accounts with ‘ OR 1=1–. During this process he successfully gained access to administrator accounts.
While accessing user accounts was fun, he decided to dig deeper using SQLMap. He crafted a request file with the vulnerable login parameters and ran sqlmap -r login.txt. SQLMap worked its magic, revealing the application’s databases. With a few more commands, he was able to enumerate tables, columns, and ultimately download the entire database, including encrypted passwords and personal information for all users, from admins to customers.
The ease with which SQLMap extracted sensitive data, while making for a great pentest report, was concerning for our customer. As a critical finding, our pentester alerted our customer immediately with remediation steps that could — and did — take place within the time of the test, allowing our pentester to confirm remediation of this critical issue all within the testing timebox. Mind you, he did login to the web application as the CEO using the information he had gathered while they were remediating the issue, just to get a nice screenshot for the proof of concept on his report.
Web Application Penetration Testing for Regulatory Compliance
Web application testing is required (or expected) under most major frameworks. Raxis engagements satisfy the testing requirement and produce audit-ready documentation through Raxis One.
PCI DSS 4.0
Satisfies Requirement 6.5 (testing for application vulnerabilities) and Requirement 11.4 (penetration testing) for in-scope web applications.
HIPAA Security Rule
Supports the technical evaluation requirement under §164.308(a)(8) for systems handling ePHI, including patient portals and provider applications.
SOC 2
Provides auditor-ready evidence for Common Criteria CC4.1 (monitoring controls) and CC7.1 (vulnerability management).
GLBA Safeguards Rule
Supports the periodic penetration testing requirement for financial institutions handling NPI through web applications.
ISO/IEC 27001:2022
Aligned with Annex A.8.29 (security testing in development and acceptance) and A.5.7 (threat intelligence informed testing).
HITRUST
Web application testing maps to HITRUST CSF controls 10.b and 10.m for organizations in healthcare and adjacent regulated industries.
Web Application Penetration Testing FAQ
Let’s Talk
Ready to Find What Scanners Miss?
Real engineers, real exploitation, real-time findings. Talk to a Raxis penetration tester about scoping a web application engagement that fits your application, your timeline, and your release cadence.
