document: SecuBat : a web vulnerability scanner As the popularity of the web increases and web applications become tools of everyday use , the role of web security has been gaining importance as well . The last years have shown a significant increase in the number of web-based attacks . For example , there has been extensive press coverage of recent security incidences involving the loss of sensitive credit card information belonging to millions of customers . Many web application security vulnerabilities result from generic input validation problems . Examples of such vulnerabilities are SQL injection and Cross-Site Scripting ( XSS ) . Although the majority of web vulnerabilities are easy to understand and to avoid , many web developers are , unfortunately , not security-aware . As a result , there exist many web sites on the Internet that are vulnerable . This paper demonstrates how easy it is for attackers to automatically discover and exploit application-level vulnerabilities in a large number of web applications . To this end , we developed SecuBat , a generic and modular web vulnerability scanner that , similar to a port scanner , automatically analyzes web sites with the aim of finding exploitable SQL injection and XSS vulnerabilities . Using SecuBat , we were able to find many potentially vulnerable web sites . To verify the accuracy of SecuBat , we picked one hundred interesting web sites from the potential victim list for further analysis and confirmed exploitable flaws in the identified web pages . Among our victims were well-known global companies and a finance ministry . Of course , we notified the administrators of vulnerable sites about potential security problems . More than fifty responded to request additional information or to report that the security hole was closed .
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