New Automated Offering Allows Organizations to Assess and Track Web Application Vulnerabilities

Infosecurity Europe 2009, 28-30 April, Earls Court, London

Slough, UK — 21 April, 2009— Qualys, the leading provider of on demand IT security risk and compliance management solutions, announced today the addition of QualysGuard Web Application Scanning (WAS) 1.0 to the QualysGuard Security and Compliance Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) Suite, the company’s flagship solution for IT security risk and compliance management. Qualys is unveiling and demoing a number of new products and product upgrades next week at the Infosecurity Europe tradeshow at Earls Court, London on Stand H70.

“We'll always have malicious code aimed at exploiting application and system vulnerabilities; therefore, the solutions and processes we use to protect our information assets will remain a top priority for us – to improve them and make them more effective over time,” said Isabelle Theisen CSO of First Advantage. “Qualys has always been an integral component within our security risk management program. The new QualysGuard suite allows us to do vulnerability and compliance scanning for systems and Web applications in one integrated solution. This provides us a ‘living' baseline of security and compliance levels for our systems and applications across multiple locations with minimal time and labor from the security and IT departments.”

QualysGuard Web Application Scanning 1.0
Delivered through a SaaS model, QualysGuard WAS delivers automated crawling and testing for custom Web applications to identify most common vulnerabilities such as those in the OWASP Top 10 and WASC Threat Classification, including SQL injection and cross-site scripting. QualysGuard WAS scales to scan any number of Web applications, internal or external in production or development environments.

Now organizations can manage Web applications, launch scans and generate reports using the familiar QualysGuard UI. Additional QualysGuard WAS features and customer benefits include:

• Crawling & Link Discovery — An embedded Web crawler parses HTML and some JavaScript to extract links. QualysGuard WAS automatically balances breadth and depth of discovered links to crawl up to 5,000 links per Web application.
• Authentication—QualysGuard WAS incorporates HTTP Basic, Digest and NTLM server-based authentications, as well as Simple form authentication.
• Black List and White List Enforcement—The application prevents the crawler from visiting black-listed links in a Web application and can instruct the crawler to only visit links explicitly defined in a white list.
• Performance Tuning—QualysGuard WAS provides granular, user-determined bandwidth level control for parallel scanning to limit impact on application performance.
• Sensitive Content—The application enables automated expression search for content in HTML, such as a Social Security Number.
• Workflows for Defining Scans and Reviewing Reports—QualysGuard WAS provides logical scan and reporting workflows for each Web application.

“Web application security is the new frontier in security and a big challenge for most organizations,” said Philippe Courtot, chairman and CEO of Qualys. “The automated nature of our new Web application scanning solution will allow our customers and partners to get a clear picture of their Web application security with the ability to scan their entire environment at the push of a button.”

“Enterprise-class Web application scanning solutions are broader, and should include a wide range of tests for major Web application vulnerability classes, such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting, and directory traversals. An enterprise solution should also be capable of scanning multiple applications, tracking results over time, providing robust reporting (especially compliance reports), and providing reports customized for local requirements,” said Rich Mogull, security analyst, Securosis.com[1].

Pricing and Availability
QualysGuard WAS is available as part of the QualysGuard Security and Compliance Suite from May 26, 2009. QualysGuard WAS annual subscriptions are based on the number of Web application(s) scanned and include unlimited number of scans and 24x7 support and updates.