Website Security Check — How to Audit Your Site
Written by the Rafter Team
A website security check is a structured review of your site for vulnerabilities that attackers could exploit — injection flaws, misconfigurations, broken authentication, exposed secrets, and outdated dependencies. Running one before an attacker does is the difference between a quiet Tuesday and an incident response call. Most web applications have at least one exploitable flaw, and the median time from vulnerability disclosure to active exploitation is now under 15 days.
If you haven't audited your site in the last 90 days, assume something has changed. New dependencies, updated frameworks, and AI-generated code all introduce risk that previous checks didn't cover.
Run a free website security check with Rafter — results in under two minutes.
What Should a Website Security Check Cover?
A thorough website security check examines your application at every layer. Skipping any one of these areas leaves a gap that automated scanners and attackers will find:
- Source code analysis (SAST) — scan your codebase for injection paths, hardcoded secrets, broken access controls, and insecure cryptography before deployment
- Dependency audit — check every package in your dependency tree against known vulnerability databases like the NVD and GitHub Advisory Database
- Configuration review — verify HTTP security headers (CSP, HSTS, X-Frame-Options), TLS settings, CORS policies, and cookie flags
- Authentication and session management — test for weak password policies, missing rate limiting, session fixation, and token handling flaws
- Infrastructure exposure — check for open ports, default credentials, publicly accessible admin panels, and misconfigured cloud storage buckets
Each of these maps to real-world attack vectors in the OWASP Top 10. Addressing them systematically is what separates a security check from a checkbox exercise.
How to Run a Website Security Check
Start with automated scanning to establish a baseline, then layer in manual review for business logic and access control flaws that scanners miss.
Step 1: Automated scan. Run a static analysis scan against your source code. This catches the highest volume of issues — injection, XSS, secrets in code — with zero manual effort.
Step 2: Dependency check. Audit your lock file. A single vulnerable transitive dependency can undermine an otherwise secure codebase. Tools that integrate into your CI/CD pipeline catch new vulnerabilities as they're disclosed, not months later.
Step 3: Configuration audit. Test your deployed site's headers and TLS configuration. Missing Content-Security-Policy or Strict-Transport-Security headers are low-effort fixes that prevent entire categories of attacks.
Step 4: Manual review. Automated tools don't understand your business logic. Test authorization boundaries manually — can a regular user access admin endpoints? Can one tenant read another's data? These flaws require human judgment.
How Often Should You Audit?
Every code change is a potential new vulnerability. Teams that run security checks on every pull request catch issues when they're cheapest to fix — before they reach production. At minimum, run a full audit quarterly and after any major dependency update, framework upgrade, or infrastructure change.
Rafter automates the first three steps — SAST, dependency scanning, and secrets detection — on every commit. Connect your repo once and every pull request gets a security review alongside your code review. No configuration to maintain, no scan results to triage manually.
Start your website security check →