Automated vulnerability scanning

Pros and cons of using Automated vulnerability scanners:

Advantages

  • Automated scans are easy to repeat, and the results can be shared within a team with ease.

  • These scanners are quick and can test numerous applications efficiently.

  • Open-source solutions exist.

  • Automated scanners cover a wide range of different vulnerabilities that may be hard to manually search for.

Disadvantages

  • People can often become reliant on these tools.

  • They are extremely “loud” and produce a lot of traffic and logging. This is not good if you are trying to bypass security controls.

  • Open-source solutions are often basic and require expensive licenses to have useful features.

  • They often do not find every vulnerability on an application.