Summary
Application vulnerabilities provide fertile ground for penetration testers seeking to gain a foothold in an organization or to exploit and pivot their initial access. Applications may suffer from a wide range of issues that allow testers to steal data, execute arbitrary code, and gain full control of systems and entire networks.
The tools used by software developers and security professionals to test code also serve as wonderful reconnaissance tools for hackers and penetration testers. Static analysis tools perform analysis of source code, while dynamic security assessment tools run code through rigorous testing to evaluate the outputs obtained from various scenarios. Together, these two techniques provide penetration testers with detailed information on the state of application security in an organization.