What is DAST?
Testing a running application from the outside by sending requests and inspecting responses — as opposed to reading the source code (that is SAST).
DAST: Testing a running application from the outside by sending requests and inspecting responses — as opposed to reading the source code (that is SAST).
In plain language
DAST tools scan a live application for known vulnerability signatures without access to the source. They are good at breadth and known patterns, and they are the category most people mean by "a scanner."
Their limit is structural: a signature match has no model of business rules or identity, so DAST misses broken access control, business logic and AI-specific risks. SuperPentest uses dynamic testing too, but investigates and reproduces rather than pattern-matches — AI pentest vs scanner.
A concrete example
A DAST scan crawls your marketing site and flags a missing security header and a reflected parameter — useful, fast, broad. But it logs in as nobody, so it never sees the tenant-scoped API where your real risk lives, and it reports the reflected parameter without confirming it executes. DAST is a good first pass; it is not a substitute for authenticated, reproduced testing.
Related
AI pentest vs scanner → · False positive →
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