AppScan helps up keep Web Apps in Compliance
September 12, 2018

AppScan helps up keep Web Apps in Compliance

Seth Shestack | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with IBM Security AppScan

We use IBM AppScan as part of our overall vulnerability management program. These assessments are in depth and use several tools, AppScan being the tool we use to look for application vulnerabilities in our Web applications.
We do a pre-production security assessment on all applications before they go live in our environment. In addition we do regularly repeated scans which primarily look for patching compliance and new vulnerabilities that may affect these applications.
  • 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
  • We have been asking IBM to upgrade the connectivity from scanner to database to use TLS 1.2. Currently uses TLS 1.0 which we are trying to completely deprecate from our environment.
  • We have been having some login issues with authenticated scans for applications that use federated login (Shibboleth) dur to re-directs and timeouts. For these systems we have to bypass the federation and login directly to the application.
  • The positive impact is that it gives us a way to identify and remediate vulnerabilities in our web applications prior to being placed in production
We have been using AppScan for about 14 years (Before it was acquired by IBM). A few years ago we did an upgrade from the standard edition to the enterprise edition (to allow several users at once) in order to accommodate the growth of our team. Prior to this upgrade we looked at several other products and decided to stay with AppScan.

One of the major reasons was our familiarity with this product so that we could upgrade without the need to train our staff on a new product. All of these products were very close in comparison so we found no compelling reason to change.
This application is well suited for all web applications with the primary difficulty being that is does not handle federated logins.
However since we have validated our federation and vetted it well it is not a critical issue to bypass federation for scanning a site, only an inconvenience as we have to setup bypass authentication and then remove so that is cannot be used by an attacker.