Web applications provide some of the greatest attack surfaces for organizations. With so many web applications that are publicly available for providing services, one must make sure they are secure. With millions of users utilizing these applications daily, and inputting all sorts of data into them, like personally identifiable information, credit card information, health information just to name a few, having a web application compromised leaves all that data available for the hacker.

With that being said, there are a lot of moving pieces to web applications, so running a penetration test against them can be daunting. I have laid out a couple of different sections that I test when running a penetration test against web applications and included various tools to test within that category. These categories follow OWASP recommendations as some of the important...