FIND A GOOD PLACE TO PERFORM SOME SECURITY TESTS
In many sources, security testing is called ethical hacking. It means that you create a controlled attack to evaluate the security status of your product.
To familiarize more with the concept of security testing, I read a very detailed tutorial. Then, after some googling, I found a wonderful place to learn more and actually perform security tests: Google’s Gruyere!
Gruyere is not only a great playground for security testing, but it has lessons and challenges to help you find vulnerabilities. If you get stuck, there are hints on how you should proceed.
I have read and tried out first few parts in Gruyere and had a great fun! It feels very nice to find security flaws. For example, I changed my account to be administrator account which enabled option Manage this server. Now I could edit any user.
Security testing always looked like a very complex and difficult area to me. I have never performed any security tests before, so this seemed like one of the biggest challenges. However, after actually trying to perform some security tests, I can say that it’s actually not that difficult. It is hacking in a way, but it’s rather knowing the product you are testing really well and trying to think of the ways how to unleash the security flaws. I will definitely come back to this exciting topic and I am very grateful to Gruyere for being such a great place to learn and execute some security tests!
P.S. Web Application Security Testing Cheat Sheet can come in handy for further learning.
Let Me Try Software Testing! 