Website Vulnerability Scanning

The single most productive thing a scan does is compare the software you run against public vulnerability databases. An outdated plugin or library with a published CVE is the entry point in most site compromises, and a scan surfaces it before an attacker’s automated sweep does.

Scans catch the boring mistakes that cause real breaches: a database backup sitting in the web root, directory listing left enabled, an admin login with no protection, debug output printing internal paths and stack traces. None are clever attacks; all are commonly exploited.

Automated checks probe inputs for injection and cross-site scripting, test for path traversal, and look for information disclosure. These map to the OWASP Top 10 categories a scanner can reliably detect, which is a useful subset, though not the whole picture.

Where a scan reaches its limit

A scanner cannot reason about your business logic. It will not notice that changing an ID in a URL returns another customer’s order, or that a checkout step can be skipped. Those need a person testing by hand, which is what a penetration test provides. An honest scanning service tells you this rather than implying a scan is the same thing.

We run established scanning engines against your site on a schedule you choose. The tools do what tools are good at: broad, tireless, repeatable coverage that would take a person far too long to do by hand every week.

Much of a modern site lives behind a login, and an unauthenticated scan never sees it. We run authenticated scans with test credentials so the members’ area, the dashboard and the account functions are covered, not just the public marketing pages. This routinely finds issues an external-only scan misses entirely.

Every finding the tools raise is reviewed by an engineer before it reaches you. False positives are removed, duplicates merged, and the real issues are rated by their actual impact on your site rather than a generic severity label. This is the step that turns a scan into something worth reading.

You get a clear report of the verified findings, each with a fix, ranked by priority. After you remediate, we re-scan the affected areas for free to confirm the issue is genuinely closed. Then the cycle repeats on schedule, so your assurance stays current.

These see your site as an anonymous visitor does. They are quick to set up and good for catching exposed files, outdated public-facing components and configuration mistakes. But they are blind to everything behind a login, which on most sites is where the sensitive functionality lives.

With valid credentials, the scan reaches the account area, the admin functions and the authenticated APIs. This is where broken access control, insecure account features and post-login injection tend to hide, so for any site with a login, authenticated scanning is where the real coverage comes from.

PCI DSS requirement 11.3 expects regular internal and external vulnerability scans, typically quarterly and after significant changes, with external scans by an approved vendor. Our recurring scanning and reporting are built to slot into that cadence and produce the evidence an assessor asks for.

ISO 27001 Annex A.12.6 covers technical vulnerability management, which a documented scanning programme directly supports. For GDPR, being able to show you actively look for and fix weaknesses is part of demonstrating appropriate technical measures for protecting personal data.

The most common serious finding is a plugin, theme or library that was current at install and has since picked up a known vulnerability. On a busy site with several contributors, things fall behind without anyone deciding to let them. A scan makes the gap visible and puts a name and a fix against it.

Database dumps, configuration files with credentials in them, old copies of pages left over from a migration, and log files sitting in a web-accessible folder. Attackers look for these first because they are easy wins, and a scan finds them the same way, just sooner.

Outdated TLS settings, weak ciphers, and missing security headers such as content security policy or strict transport security. Individually minor, collectively they widen the surface for attacks like session hijacking and clickjacking, and they are quick to fix once flagged.

We rank findings so you spend your time where it counts. A critical or high finding with a known exploit gets fixed this week; a low-severity informational note can wait for the next maintenance window. Because we have already stripped the noise, the ranking reflects real risk to your site rather than a scanner’s blanket scoring, and your developers are not left guessing which of two hundred lines actually matters.