Acunetix

A well priced, cloud based vulnerability scanner

Avantages :

I can schedule daily, weekly or monthly scans of targets which checks for vulnerabilities in our cloud infrastructure from one control panel. The ability to send different types of reports to various parties, for example a 'Board level' report or 'Developer' report is handy for tailoring content to the audience.

Inconvénients :

It perhaps could be improved by adding a section for commenting on how a vulnerability was fixed and a link to a relevant URL to confirm this. Pricing is good for a small amount of targets, but quickly becomes expensive for multiple target locations.

Simple, but very powerful web vunlerability scanner

Commentaires : Good thing for a web application pentesting, can give You insight of a present vulnerabilities. Would recommend using in tandem with infrastructure scanner (like Nessus) to create a complete testing solution. Also presence of continous scanning and scheduler could be used for a regular security assesment of Your web applications.

Avantages :

Ease of use, good customer support, very insightful reports (especially Developer raport), good vulnerability management. Also continous scanning option is an interesting thing for having continous security awareness of Your vulnerability level. Also login sequence recorder is an awesome tool.

Inconvénients :

Not a lot of scan options to configure - especially in comparison to Nessus - every check is done in default, You can't choose specifically which test is done in selected scan, only the type of scan (full, high-risk vulnerabilities, xss, sqli, weak passwords, crawl only ) or technology in which the scanned web app is written.

Ok tool, but fix your business model and add more settings to the interface

Commentaires : Continuation of the cons section (number of chars was limited). * Settings are sometimes unclear, an info icon with a popup would be nice. Example 1: In the "Site Structure" of a scan it is possible to press "exclude", does it exlude the path from futre scans? If so why don't I see anything in the target settings? Or does "exlude" exclude vulnerabilities from the report? BTW after pressing exlude I'm not able to "include" it again.

Example 2: "scan speed", how many threads per setting are we talking about? * Would definitly like to get some more feedback from scans directly in the interface, what is it doing, why did it fail, did all the "allowed hosts" got scanned etc. I know you can debug a target, but this is not what I mean.

Avantages :

* The number of checks that take place. * The quality of the issues found. * After years it is finally possible to pause a scan, hallelujah.

Inconvénients :

* As a pentester I absolutely miss a more flexible way to configure settings like it was possible in v10. The interface is built as "point a shoot", idiot proof. Currently, If I want to configure things I need to change xml config files on the server and reload acunetix... * After the release of v12 we were called by a sales agent as we suddently couldn't add targets anymore. The license model suddenly changed completely. The entire business model is now based on scanning an applications continuously over the year. However, as a pentesting business for we mostly scan apps just 1 time for our security assessments. It absolutely makes no sense to apply the same costs! Just like Netsparker, acunetix should have plans for pentesters and consultants. * Scanning an app that spans multiple domains always results in problems. Currently you have the "Allowed hosts" settings which is crappy in setting up. I need to set all (sub) domains to a different target. And ofcourse with the current business model you are charged per target, lol.

Easy to setup, nice results

Commentaires : As a scanner it is quite good, relevant and well described findings, so far no false positives. Following an initial trial and PoC with couple of competitors, Acunetix had the best features, most suitable licensing model, good support, so we purchased a three year license. However, at some point, it all changed. The license became based on other criteria, the testing and verification tools were removed, there is no support or way of reverting to a previous version, after you realise that the changes introduced and making the software unusable or insufficient. Overall, unless there are guarantees that it won't happen again, I will be very reluctant to renew.

Avantages :

Very easy to setup initially, running scans quite fast, good crawler, very nice and understandable results.

Inconvénients :

The license model changed somehow in the middle of the three years, so it became impossible to continue to use it as planned without paying much more. Tools were removed.

Acunetix always gives me a very good first impression

Avantages :

We are using Acunetix now for more than 5 years. It is very easy to create new targets and quickly start automatic scans. The AcuSensor often gives me a good hint where I should take a closer look manually. Our management likes the well structured reports.

Inconvénients :

If a web application is very complex, the scanner sometimes does not really manage to find its path through the process. Since the application changed to the web gui, it is more complicated to specify pre-recorded login sequence. The user has to log into the server, where Acunetix is hostet and start a different application to record the sequence.