Web Application Penetration Testing Services

Authentication and session handling

• ▸Credential stuffing and brute-force resistance, lockout and rate-limit behaviour
• ▸Password reset and email-change flows, including token reuse and host-header poisoning
• ▸Session fixation, session invalidation on logout and password change, cookie flags
• ▸Multi-factor bypass paths: remembered devices, backup codes, step-up enforcement gaps
• ▸OAuth and SSO flows: redirect_uri validation, state parameter, token leakage via referrer

Authorisation and access control

• ▸IDOR and object-level authorisation on every enumerable identifier
• ▸Horizontal escalation between accounts, vertical escalation to admin roles
• ▸Multi-tenant isolation: cross-tenant reads and writes through shared endpoints
• ▸Function-level authorisation on undocumented and legacy endpoints
• ▸Mass assignment and parameter tampering on role or plan fields

Input handling and injection

• ▸SQL, NoSQL and command injection, including second-order paths
• ▸Reflected, stored and DOM-based cross-site scripting
• ▸Server-side request forgery, including cloud metadata endpoints
• ▸XML external entity processing and insecure deserialisation
• ▸Template injection and path traversal in file handling

API layer

• ▸REST and GraphQL endpoints, documented and auto-discovered
• ▸GraphQL introspection exposure, query depth and batching abuse
• ▸Rate limiting and resource exhaustion on expensive operations
• ▸Authorisation on internal and service-to-service endpoints
• ▸Sensitive data exposure in responses, errors and response headers

Business logic

• ▸Workflow and state-machine bypass: skipped steps, replayed transitions
• ▸Price, quantity, discount and currency manipulation in checkout flows
• ▸Quota, trial and entitlement bypass on metered features
• ▸Race conditions on balance, inventory and invitation logic
• ▸Multi-step attack chains that combine low-severity findings into a real breach path

Configuration and exposure

• ▸Security headers, CORS policy and cookie configuration
• ▸Exposed secrets in frontend bundles, response headers and error output
• ▸Directory listing, backup files, debug endpoints and verbose stack traces
• ▸Subdomain and endpoint discovery across the application attack surface
• ▸TLS configuration and mixed-content issues

We push code several times a week but only test security once a year. How do we close that gap?

Run the test on the same cadence as your deployments instead of on a calendar. A team merging 50 changes a week accumulates roughly 2,500 untested changes between annual assessments: new endpoints, changed authorisation logic, updated dependencies.

The practical path is to keep the annual engagement if a customer or auditor requires a signed human report, and put continuous testing underneath it so the other 51 weeks are covered. Penetrify runs on every deployment through CI/CD and on demand between releases, so a change is tested when it ships and not months later when the context is gone.

How much do web application penetration testing services cost?

Manual engagements are commonly quoted between $15,000 and $50,000 per application, driven by consultant days rather than by application size. That is why most teams buy one per year and live with the gap.

Automated services are priced as a subscription: Penetrify starts at $100 per month with retests included. The honest comparison is not price per report but coverage per year — one engagement versus continuous testing, both of which have their place. Our cost calculator breaks down the trade-off for a specific app count and release cadence.

Do we need a penetration testing service or is a vulnerability scanner enough?

A scanner is enough for known, pattern-matchable classes: missing headers, outdated components, obvious injection points. It is not enough for anything that requires understanding what your application is for.

Broken access control and business-logic flaws are the two categories that scanners structurally cannot cover, because there is no signature for "this user should not be able to read that invoice". Those are also the findings that lose customer data. If your app has roles, tenants, or a checkout flow, you need testing that reasons about intent, whether that comes from a human or an AI agent.

A customer is asking for a pentest report this week. What are our options?

You can have a report today. Point Penetrify at the application, run an authenticated test, and export the findings report with severity ratings, reproduction steps and remediation guidance — the format security reviewers expect.

What you cannot get in a week is a signed report from a CREST or OSCP-certified human tester, because scheduling alone takes longer than that. If the customer contract specifically names third-party manual testing, use the automated report to fix everything findable now, and book the human engagement in parallel so the retest comes back clean.

We are a small team without a security engineer. Can we actually run this?

Yes, and that is the design constraint. There is no agent to install, no scanner to tune, and no proxy to configure: you add a URL and credentials, and findings come back written for the developer who has to fix them.

Each finding includes the request that triggered it, so verification does not depend on security expertise. Teams typically start with a single scan of production or staging, fix the critical findings, then wire the same test into CI so regressions are caught by the pipeline instead of by a person remembering to run something.

How do you scope a web application penetration test?

Scope by role and by surface, not by page count. List every authentication role that exists (anonymous, user, admin, support, service account) and every surface that accepts input (web UI, REST and GraphQL APIs, webhooks, file upload, admin panel).

Give the tester credentials for each role. Unauthenticated-only testing misses the majority of access-control findings by definition, because you cannot test whether user A can read user B's data without both accounts. Staging is acceptable if it mirrors production authorisation logic and data model; if it does not, test production with rate limits agreed up front.

Every validated finding with CVSS severity, affected endpoint, the request and response that prove it, business impact, and remediation guidance written for developers.

The exact request sequence for each finding, so your team can confirm the issue and verify the fix without re-deriving the attack.

Where low-severity findings combine into an exploitable path, the chain is documented end to end rather than split across unrelated tickets.

Each rerun records what closed, what regressed and when, which is the evidence trail auditors and enterprise security reviewers ask for.

Send a read-only report to a customer or auditor without giving them access to your account.

CC6.1: logical access controls, commonly evidenced with penetration testing results

A.12.6: technical vulnerability management including regular security testing

Requirement 11.4.1: documented pentest methodology; testing at least every 12 months and after significant changes

45 CFR §164.308(a)(8): regular evaluation of technical and nontechnical safeguards

Article 32: regular testing of technical security measures

Articles 24–25: annual resilience testing of critical systems; Article 26: TLPT at least every 3 years for designated entities