How to Choose DAST Tools: 9 Evaluation Tips for a Perfect Decision

Quick Summary: DAST tools are crucial for proactive security testing that helps identify and address vulnerabilities in the early phases. However, it is tricky to choose the best DAST tool given so many options. This blog provides expert-recommended tips that will help you pick the right tool.

In a world where cyberattacks are widespread and more complex, DevSecOps teams need a robust DAST tool to protect web apps. By simulating attacks on running applications, such a tool can discover diverse vulnerabilities, including OWASP top 10, and help teams avoid security breaches and data leaks.

Being technology-agnostic, DAST tools can quickly and accurately discover vulnerabilities in modern applications regardless of the underlying technologies. But there is one problem – given so many options out there, how do you choose the right dynamic application security testing tool?

In this blog post, you will find a checklist of the key considerations for sorting out the best DAST tool from a horde of options. It enables you to ask the right questions to make the best choice.

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Key Factors to Consider for Choosing the Best DAST Tools

The decision to invest in a DAST tool determines how robust your security posture will be. The right tool will help you avoid data breaches and prevent cyberattacks with a stronger security posture. It will uncover all critical attack points precisely to help your teams strengthen the defense mechanism.

While there is a huge list of DAST tools, many of them cannot detect all vulnerabilities quickly and efficiently. So, you must carefully evaluate different options to make the right decision. We have listed some crucial parameters that help you choose the best DAST tools.

Depth and Accuracy

Modern web applications are highly complex and have lots of input, and ordinary DAST solutions miss most of them. Usually, DAST tools crawl applications and check all these inputs that are potential attack points. However, not every DAST tool can detect these inputs, leaving your application vulnerable to cyberattacks.

So, look for a tool that features a comprehensive scanning and crawling engine that can identify vulnerabilities for modern applications beyond OWASP top 10. The tool should be able to crawl JavaScript-heavy applications such as SPAs to uncover more complex vulnerabilities.

Efficient Remediation

The best DAST tools not only detect and report vulnerabilities, but they also streamline remediation. Prefer a tool that shortens the length of the remediation process for developers by providing them with actionable reports to fix vulnerabilities.

The tool should offer detailed reports comprising isolated information about the root cause of every vulnerability, recommended steps for mitigation, and proof of exploitation to avoid chasing false vulns. Faster remediation will reduce the overall time in build and release cycles.

API Scanning

APIs are the backbone of modern web applications, especially those that are built on microservices. Additionally, they efficiently scan apps that are built on custom code combined with open-source or third-party dependencies that connect via APIs.

So, the right DAST tools will combine API discovery and assessment features with AppSec capabilities to offer comprehensive security assessment. Hence, select a DAST scanner that is able to test APIs based on OpenAPI and other specifications.

Compliance-based Scanning

Applications often need to comply with various regulatory requirements and industry-specific standards. This is especially the case for companies operating in the healthcare and finance sectors. Ensuring compliance can be tricky and time-consuming, but that can be automated with DAST tools.

If compliance is crucial for your business, select a DAST solution that automates compliance testing and reporting for regulations and standards like ISO 27001, PCI DSS, GDPR, HIPAA, etc. With compliance reports, your business can identify areas that must be addressed to ensure compliance and demonstrate feasible security measures.

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Frictionless Integration

When it comes to selecting the best DAST tool, its ability to integrate into development workflows is non-negotiable, especially for Agile teams. By incorporating the tool into SDLC, your development team can detect vulnerabilities in real-time to take prompt actions and fix them before pushing to production.

It eliminates lengthy and cumbersome exchanges between security and dev teams, shortening the overall development cycle and ensuring faster releases. Therefore, it’s crucial to pick a DAST tool that seamlessly integrates not only with your CI/CD tools but also aligns with existing security solutions.

Performance and Scalability

Prefer a dynamic application security testing tool that offers the right balance between features and performance. Why so? While a lack of features can result in incomplete assessment and missed vulnerabilities, excessive features can slow down performance.

Hence, choosing a DAST tool that offers a balance between performance and features ensures efficient detection and remediation of vulnerabilities without affecting the system. Apart from this, scalability is also a crucial factor to consider when choosing a dynamic application security testing tool.

A scalable DAST solution will enable you to scan as many applications as you want, whether you manage one or thousands of them.

Enhanced Visibility

You should rely on a DAST tool that offers enhanced visibility into the security posture covering not only running first-party but also third-party code. It should be able to scan open-source components besides common security issues like misconfigurations, authentication problems, and encryption failure.

Real-Time Insights

Longer development cycles not only delay product delivery but also increase your development costs. Slow vulnerability detection and remediation processes stretch the development cycle. Hence, development teams need instant actionable data to address vulnerabilities faster, speeding up the process.

They need a top-tier DAST tool that accelerates the development process by providing real-time alerts for vulnerabilities as they arise to quickly build and deploy applications. It will significantly reduce both time and cost in application development.

AI-powered Reporting

Modern DAST scanning platforms offer AI-powered remediation reports that do not merely highlight the risks but also provide detailed real-time AI-driven insights and prioritized results for identifying and addressing the threats most effectively. This will allow developers or security teams to fix vulnerabilities rapidly while reducing manual efforts.

Top 3 DAST Tools [Comparison]

The following DAST tools feature comparison highlights the strengths and weaknesses of the top three tools used by organizations, security teams, and developers.

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In a Nutshell

Security testing is a pivotal aspect of developing and releasing web applications that can resist cyberattacks. DAST tools automate testing and enable developers to detect and resolve vulnerabilities early before they hit the production environment.

These tools dynamically test applications at runtime, allowing them to detect more complex vulnerabilities that static code analysis tools fail to identify. Although there are a lot of tools for DAST scanning, ZeroThreat offers an edge in terms of better accuracy, speed, and in-depth assessments.

As a next-gen DAST scanning platform, ZeroThreat is designed to streamline the workflow of modern development and security teams by automating and speeding up AppSec. It offers faster detection and prioritization of vulnerabilities, reducing the remediation time significantly.

With high-precision vulnerability detection and near-zero false positives, it is a critical tool for development and security teams in AppSec. Try it now and check all its benefits!