You are responsible for security at a company that uses a lot of Web applications. You are most concerned about flaws in those applications allowing some attacker to get into your network. What…

Manual penetration testing is thorough but time-intensive and impractical for covering many web applications quickly at scale.

Code review requires access to source code and is effective at finding logic flaws but does not simulate external attack vectors the way active scanning does.

Automated penetration testing goes further than scanning but is more resource-intensive and is typically used after initial vulnerability discovery, not as the primary discovery method.

Vulnerability scanners such as Nikto, OWASP ZAP, or Nessus are purpose-built to automatically detect known web application flaws including SQL injection, XSS, and misconfigurations across multiple applications. When a company uses a large number of web apps, automated scanning provides broad and repeatable coverage that manual methods cannot efficiently match. This makes vulnerability scanning the most efficient first-line approach for the scenario described.