OWASP ZAP

ZAP is an open-source security testing tool developed by OWASP. It is designed for finding security vulnerabilities in web applications during development and testing.

ZAP is well-supported by the OWASP community, and it's designed to be an open-source, collaborative tool for web application security testing.

Features

Automated Scanning: ZAP includes an automated scanner that identifies common vulnerabilities like XSS, SQL injection, and CSRF.

Active and Passive Scanning: ZAP can passively monitor traffic and actively scan for vulnerabilities in web applications.

Spider: It has a spidering tool that navigates through a website, discovering and mapping its structure for further testing.

Fuzzer: ZAP offers a fuzzer for automated testing of input fields with various payloads to discover vulnerabilities.

Session Management: ZAP can be used to manage and manipulate user sessions, which is useful for security testing.

Perform Web Spidering

In this process, we will employ OWASP ZAP to conduct web spidering on the target website. Attackers often resort to web spidering or crawling to uncover concealed content and functionality not accessible through the visible main content. This technique can be exploited to manipulate user privileges within the application, retrieve backup copies of live files, access configuration and log files with sensitive data, access backup archives containing file snapshots from the web root, and discover new functionality not directly linked to the main application.

Launch OWASP ZAP by opening your terminal or command prompt and typing zapproxy

After hitting Enter, the OWASP ZAP main window will appear.

Under the "Quick Start" tab, select the "Automated Scan" option found in the "Welcome to OWASP ZAP" section.

The "Automated Scan" wizard will open. In the "URL to attack" field, input the target website. Leave the other settings as default and click the "Attack" button.

OWASP ZAP will commence scanning the target website, and you can monitor the progress with various URLs listed under the "Spider" tab.

Once web spidering is complete, OWASP ZAP proceeds to active scanning. You can navigate to the "Active Scan" tab to observe the scanned links.

Upon the active scan's conclusion, the results will be displayed under the "Alerts" tab, revealing vulnerabilities and issues associated with the target website.

To view the web spidering information, click on the "Spider" tab at the lower section of the window. By default, the "URLs" tab will appear within the "Spider" tab.

For more detailed information about the URLs obtained during web spidering, navigate to the "Messages" tab under the "Spider" tab.