ABSTRACT

Penetration testing is one of the hottest research areas regarding securi ty that deals with auditing of websites for various security breaches. Penetration test is carried out by the security professional to audit the websites to identify the security issues that were not addressed by web developers. Several methods have been employed for penetration testing by utilizing various vulnerability scanners to identify security breaches. The results of penetration test can be used to overcome the discovered vulnerabilities to secure any organization from disaster. Same approach can be used by the hackers to identify the security breaches to hack website and cause any organization to lose their valuable assets. Pakjstan is among one of the emerging countries where usage of Internet has drastically increased; most of the organizations from government sectors, education sector, or private sector now rely on websites to provide valuable information to their rapidly increasing visitors. Many of commercial websites in Pakistan are now doing their businesses online. Some recent attacks against Pakistani websites suggest that the developers of these web applications have ignored the security issues and just paid attention towards the development of the eye catching websites. Many of the websites found today are vulnerable to some major attacks such as SQL Injec tion, cross site script. cross site request forgery, cross site tracing, denial of service, and buffer overflow. The goals of this research work is to identify the web vulnerabilities present in Pakistani websites, propose a suitable solution to these vulnerabilitie s and present the
statistical data of vulnerable websites in graphical form. which is gathered from
educational websites, commercial websites and government sector websites.