HCL AppScan Reviews

It is used for a DevOps environment, to perform a security profile, a code profile assessment. When you are building your software code, before finishing the build process and deploying to production, we run AppScan to figure out any security vulnerabilities in the code. It's called static analysis of the code.

It decreases the operational risk, security risk, a lot. In fact, when we first used it, the number of vulnerability alerts generated by the tool was huge. As time goes on, we can decrease those vulnerabilities because we learn from it. So, in the next release of the software, or new software that we have to develop, we know upfront that we should take care of some of the characteristics of the software.

It highlights, with several grades of severity, the types of vulnerabilities, so we can focus on the most severe security vulnerabilities in the code.

One thing that we would like in this tool is that it keeps ahead of the security guys, because one big advantage of this tool is that it always offers updates. Security is a process, you mitigate a risk, but the malware guys, they're trying to find another security hole in your environment. And the technology is evolving. So new security vulnerabilities are in the software. The point is, I hope that IBM continue, in improving and launching new versions, new upgrades, that can mitigate those security risks. 

That's the most important value. It's not the tool itself, but the continuous enhancement of the tool. That's why we recommended this tool.

It's pretty stable. No issues as far as I can remember. 

It's scalable. In the beginning, we found some issues regarding installing the tool in an open-source Jenkins environment - Jenkins is a tool for open-source. Jenkins and other tools, they automate the process. Those tools call AppScan in a way to generate a proper time to do this. But after a couple of discussions, we solved the problem, so we don't have any issues anymore.

I think it is pretty good. They answer in a very fast manner.

It's pretty straightforward to install and use it.

One competitor that I remember, one of the last candidates in the evaluation process was Checkmarx. Those tools, especially from startups that come from Israel, they try to grab this market space that IBM dominates.

That's why they have to take care in terms of the price; the price model. But other than that, it would be unbeatable.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor, first of all, is their capability to continuously invest in the development and enhancement of the software. We are in a very changing process, software is a very changing environment, in terms of the technology. If you develop a tool, launch this tool, but don't have enough commitment to upgrade, to continuously enhance, it's not worth it. That's why I think IBM has a good presence in this area.

My advice would be, don't see only the cost. Try to see the capability of the tools and, besides that, as I have stressed in this review, the capability of the vendor to invest in enhancing and mitigating the risks that will come. New risks, new threats, security threats, will appear. If you don't have a company that is continuously enhancing its software, there will be a problem.

I would rate this product a nine out of 10. The reason I don't give it a 10 is because AppScan is a little bit expensive. IBM needs to work a little bit on the pricing model, decreasing the license cost. But with the maintenance - and the maintenance is the most important, as I told you, because it has to continuously enhance the tool to mitigate the increasing malware in the future - IBM could recover the investment and meet their target margins in another way.

Unfortunately, there is a big discussion if it is very expensive, to use it or not, and there are competitors. I see competitors trying to grab this market.

But from the point of view of quality, very excellent quality, it's above all the tools that I have worked with.

The most valuable feature of this product is its capability to detect XSS and SQL injection.

Security issues reported by the tool help customers write secure code.

• Better detection of DOM-based XSS
• Better remediation guidance using code examples and contexts

I have used it for four years.

I did not encounter any deployment, stability or scalability issues.

I previously used HP WebInspect and Qualys.

I prefer Appscan, as it much more user friendly, and it detects cross-site scripting and SQL injection issues much better than other tools in the market. Also, it has a lower false-positive count than others.

It is used as a last check before moving code to production. Therefore, it is used as a developer tool.

With AppScan, we are now deploying less defects to production.

We leverage it as a quality check against code.

No stability issues.

We have a strong partnership with IBM. Their tech support is very knowledgeable.

We were using something else (a competing product of IBM), but we switched to AppScan because it is reliable.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: At the end of the day, it would have to be the support and relationship. There are a lot of smart people out there building products which do things. However, not everyone can use them, and without having someone to call, it is sort of its own disadvantage. 

The benefits are that we that we can find security vulnerabilities fast, get that back to development teams, and report on those. They can then act, fix the issues, and we'll have a secure code in place.

It is easy it is to use. It is quick to find things, because of the code scanning tools. It's quite simple to use and it is very good the way it reports the findings.

We would like to be able to integrate to some of the other tools that we are using. That would be great. We would like to integrate with some of the other reporting tools that we're planning to use in the future.

I think it's quite stable.

So far scalability is pretty good.

We're really happy with technical support. They are great and very responsive.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

What I look for most in a vendor is the product, the offer, the service, the vendor service, and after sale support.

I would definitely recommend this product.

We perform more dynamic scanning using AppScan. We set up a scan, perform it and get the results, and then give the results back to our customer.

Within our organization, there are four members of the team who are using it.

Currently, we are satisfied with AppScan but I am sure there are better alternatives available because this is a very old product. It's been on market for more than ten years now. I am sure there are a lot of new age products that are more scalable and cloud-based. Although we are using it and will probably continue to do so moving forward, I think there are better alternatives on the market now.

It takes care of our dynamic scanning needs. 

It's a good product. It's automated crawler identifies all urls and performs security tests. It has a very rich test cases which ensures pretty good coverage in terms of security testing. The UI is user friendly and intuitive. 

There are some false positives, which need to be removed, but this is common with all types of scanners.

One thing which I think can be improved is the CI/CD Integration. There is a CI/CD Integration model, but I guess they are deliberately not using it currently. There are challenges when integrating AppScan with CI/CD because sometimes the activation plus the login mechanism provided doesn't work properly. Sometimes a login mechanism fails and then the whole scan fails. It's difficult to integrate with CI/CD.

I have been using this solution for almost two years.

Scalability-wise, I'm not sure because you can buy the licenses depending on how many scans you want to do, but yes, it's scalable. I can do multiple scans simultaneously, but we have not tried more than that. I cannot tell you whether it can scale up to more than maybe two, three, or four simultaneous scans. We have not tested that.

The technical support is quite good. They always respond quickly.

Installation is pretty straightforward. Deployment only took a day or two.

We deployed it ourselves. Even one person can manage it so that's not an issue, but currently, we have four users who perform the activities and scans because of the volume of requests that we received from different businesses.

I would recommend AppScan to other businesses. In a small-scale setup, it works perfectly fine, but if you are a larger organization with a lot of applications and you need to do CI/CD, then it's probably not the solution for you. Conversely, in a small organization with less than 20 applications, this will work pretty nicely.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of seven.

If they can integrate with CI/CD and make the log-in mechanism a little smoother, they should be able to scale it up. If they could integrate with the CI/CD pipeline and make the scans a little faster, then I would give it a higher rating.

External and internal web application vulnerability scan.

• We were able to easily diagnose a large number of web applications automatically.
• The depth was low, but the part that the user could miss was also diagnosed.

AppScan seems to be very good at detecting reflected XSS vulnerabilities. This increases the security of web applications that are in operation.

It would be nice to be able to specify the parameter values ​​used in the login sequence function.

The primary use case is to detect time-based Blind SQL Injection attacks, as well as Error-Based Injection attacks. The SQL injection attack is my favorite and I have more expertise in this vulnerability.

This solution saves us time due to the low number of false positives detected. Other scanners have an issue with respect to reporting false positives.

The most valuable feature is that it achieves a very low false-positive detection rate.

While I did not identify any specific bugs in this application. I did find that sometimes a restart was needed to deal with unresponsiveness means when AppScan is in a hang situation, this happens usually when you select a large number of sources. 

IBM Security AppScan needs to add performance optimization for quickly scanning the target web applications.

We previously used Burp Suite. This application is best for static scanning.

Complex

We also evaluated Acunetix and Nexpose.

IBM AppScan has made our work easy, as we can do four to five scans of websites at a time, which saves time when it comes to vulnerability.

Many features are valuable but some features stand out, like using our own scripts, and capturing the authentication.

• It has crashed at times
• Scans become slow on large websites
• Many silly false positives are produced

Yes, sometimes we encounter stability issues.

Yes, sometimes we encounter scalability issues.

I would rate tech support a seven out of 10.

Yes. We switched because they made our work easier, with fewer false positives.

It was simple, once we watched many video tutorials and read PDFs to learn about it.

Yes, I used with Acunetix and open source tools.