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Detecting Vulnerabilities

Due to negligence or inadequate information when building or implementing an application, it can be vulnerable to attacks. From this article, you will learn how the Wallarm platform detects application vulnerabilities enabling you to enhance system security.

What is a vulnerability?

A vulnerability is an error made due to negligence or inadequate information when building or implementing an application. A vulnerability can be exploited by an attacker to cross privilege boundaries (i.e. perform unauthorized actions) within an application.

Vulnerability detection methods

When scanning the application for active vulnerabilities, Wallarm sends requests with attack signs to the protected application address and analyzes application responses. If the response matches one or more pre‑defined vulnerability signs, Wallarm records active vulnerability.

For example: if the response to the request sent to read the /etc/passwd contents returns the /etc/passwd contents, protected application is vulnerable to the Path Traversal attacks. Wallarm will record the vulnerability with an appropriate type.

To detect vulnerabilities in the application, Wallarm uses the following methods:

  • Passive detection: identifies vulnerabilities by analyzing real traffic, including both requests and responses. This can happen during a security incident, where a real flaw is exploited, or when requests show signs of vulnerabilities, like compromised JWTs, without direct flaw exploitation.

  • Threat Replay Testing: lets you turn attackers into penetration testers and discover possible security issues from their activity as they probe your apps/APIs for vulnerabilities. This module finds possible vulnerabilities by probing application endpoints using real attack data from the traffic. By default this method is disabled.

  • API Attack Surface Management (AASM): discovers external hosts with their APIs, for each of them identifies missing WAF/WAAP solutions and vulnerabilities.

  • API Discovery insights: the vulnerability was found by API Discovery module due to PII transfer in query parameters of GET requests.

Passive detection

Passive detection refers to identifying vulnerabilities by analyzing actual traffic, including both requests and responses. Vulnerabilities may be uncovered during a security incident, where a malicious request successfully exploits a flaw, resulting in the detection of both an incident and a vulnerability. Or when requests show signs of vulnerabilities, like compromised JWTs, without direct flaw exploitation.

Passive vulnerability detection is enabled by default.

Threat Replay Testing

Wallarm's Threat Replay Testing turns attackers into your own penetration testers. It analyzes initial attack attempts, then explores other ways the same attack could be exploited. This exposes weak spots in your environment that even the original attackers did not find. Read more

The Threat Replay Testing capabilities:

  • Real-time testing: Uses live attack data to spot current and potential future weak spots, keeping you one step ahead of hackers.

  • Safe & smart simulation: Skips sensitive authentication details and removes harmful code in tests. Simulates attack techniques for max security, not risking actual harm.

  • Safe non-production tests: Enables you to run vulnerability checks in a staging or development setup using real production data, but without the risks like system overload or data exposure.

API Attack Surface Management (AASM)

How it works

Wallarm's API Attack Surface Management (AASM) is an agentless detection solution tailored to the API ecosystem, designed to discover external hosts with their APIs, identify missing WAF/WAAP solutions, and mitigate API Leaks and other vulnerabilities.

Configuration

You enable and configure API Attack Surface Management to detect hosts under your selected domains and search for security issues related to these hosts as described here.

For detected hosts, Wallarm will automatically search for vulnerabilities.

Replacement of old Scanner

From May 7, 2025, AASM replaced the old Scanner as a more sophisticated and comfortable tool for host and API discovery.

API Discovery insights

When endpoints identified by the API Discovery module transfer Personally Identifiable Information (PII) in query parameters of GET requests (see CWE-598), Wallarm recognizes these endpoints as having the information exposure vulnerability.

False positives

False positive occurs when attack signs are detected in the legitimate request or when legitimate entity is qualified as a vulnerability. More details on false positives in attack detection →

False positives in vulnerability scanning may occur due to the protected application specificities. Similar responses to similar requests may indicate an active vulnerability in one protected application and be expected behavior of another protected application.

If a false positive for a vulnerability is detected, you can add an appropriate mark to the vulnerability in Wallarm Console. A vulnerability marked as a false positive will be closed and will not be rechecked.

If the detected vulnerability exists in the protected application but cannot be fixed, we recommend setting up the Create a virtual patch rule. This rule will allow blocking attacks exploiting the detected type of vulnerability and will eliminate the risk of an incident.

Managing discovered vulnerabilities

All detected vulnerabilities are displayed in the Wallarm Console → Vulnerabilities section. You can manage vulnerabilities through the interface as follows:

  • View and analyze vulnerabilities

  • Run vulnerability status verification: still active or fixed on the application side

  • Close vulnerabilities or mark them as false positives

Vulnerabilities section

If you use the API Discovery module of the Wallarm platform, vulnerabilities are linked with discovered API endpoints, e.g.:

API Discovery - Risk score

For more information on managing vulnerabilities, see the instructions on working with vulnerabilities.

Notifications about discovered vulnerabilities

Wallarm can send you notifications on discovered vulnerabilities. It allows you to be aware of newly discovered vulnerabilities of your applications and respond to them promptly. Responding to vulnerabilities includes fixing them on the application side, reporting false positives and applying virtual patches.

To configure notifications:

  1. Create the native integration with the system to send notifications (e.g. PagerDuty, Opsgenie, Splunk, Slack, Telegram).

  2. In the integration card, select the Vulnerabilities detected in the list of available events.

Example of the Splunk notification about detected vulnerability:

{
    summary:"[Test message] [Test partner(US)] New vulnerability detected",
    description:"Notification type: vuln

                New vulnerability was detected in your system.

                ID: 
                Title: Test
                Domain: example.com
                Path: 
                Method: 
                Discovered by: 
                Parameter: 
                Type: Info
                Threat: Medium

                More details: https://us1.my.wallarm.com/object/555


                Client: TestCompany
                Cloud: US
                ",
    details:{
        client_name:"TestCompany",
        cloud:"US",
        notification_type:"vuln",
        vuln_link:"https://us1.my.wallarm.com/object/555",
        vuln:{
            domain:"example.com",
            id:null,
            method:null,
            parameter:null,
            path:null,
            title:"Test",
            discovered_by:null,
            threat:"Medium",
            type:"Info"
        }
    }
}