AppScan (formerly Rational AppScan) is an application security testing solution acquired by HCL Technologies from IBM in late 2018. Appscan supports both dynamic (DAST) and static (SAST) application security testing.
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PortSwigger Burp Suite
Score 9.4 out of 10
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The Burp Suite, from UK-based alcohol-themed software company PortSwigger Web Security, is an application security and testing solution.
In HCL AppScan automation maintain a reasonable pace of review and remediation of flaws for our apps. HCL AppScan is a cloud-based enterprise mobile application security testing solution for Android and iOS applications developed using Java, .Net or Objective-C. So it covers all our area and It consists of three components: AppScan Source Edition for developing and testing apps internally, AppScan Standard Edition for testing internally or externally, and AppScan Enterprise Edition for large enterprises who need to secure their entire mobile application portfolio across the organization with multiple device types.
Burp Suite is a good general tool to test websites as long as your website is not too large or you have the time for it to complete. We have some websites that only about five to ten minutes for Burp Suite to complete an attack and a spider only takes about two minutes. Other websites have taken a few hours to complete. I have seen a tester actually run Burp Suite against one of our websites and it took all day to complete.
AppScan works well in finding application vulnerabilities such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting and all of the OWASP top 10.
Flexible reporting allows us to generate executive reports for application owners as well as separate technical reports for developers and system engineers.
Technical reports include remediation information and cross reference CVSS scores
Because it maintains data on all repeated assessments it helps us to do trending and metrics on compliance
The interface is a big problem: No matter how many features a software provides you, if the features are not well presented, you will miss most of them when they are actually required. The presentation of the software should be improvised and made more presentable.
Tutorial videos for beginners: This software lacks a lot in tutorials. A beginner almost wastes most of the time in finding and understanding the features and the implementation of the same. The software vendor should work on providing more in-depth videos so that people can learn and understand the concepts.
Easy to use once you learn it; however, the user interface is not very intuitive at first view. Port Swigger does provide a lot of video resources for self-paced learning which helps. Most of the end users for PortSwigger Burp Suite will be technical and should be able to learn the product with the free resources.
BurpSuite does not have an amazing customer support. All the major help that you will find is from public forums and Google. Although you will find all the required information on Google, still at time professional support helps you solve the problem in much less time and make your operations go smoothly.
Both solutions are decent, however, I had team members who had the experience working with HCL AppScan. Also, the product was priced nominally which suited our budget. Further, HCL AppScan's user community was bigger and many learning resources were freely available which helped junior peers learn quickly and eliminate any issues
Each tool is specific and are good for what they do. While Burp Suite can perform some level of the same functions, somehow security consultants prefer these tools as additional to the Burp Suite. Maybe due to open source and easy setup when compared to Burp Suite. But Burp Suite allows for one tool for many templates for each project.
There are countless implementations to accomplish the same thing, and so many configurations are required.
Even if you test it finished and find no vulnerabilities, there is no point if you just get the error screen.
Until now, I was worried about vulnerabilities and security in software development, but I think it was good to find the vulnerability problem quickly with HCL AppScan.