What is the purpose of notifying stakeholders prior to a scheduled vulnerability scan?

Vulnerability scanners actively probe systems by sending crafted packets and requests, which can overwhelm resources and cause crashes or reboots on unstable or legacy systems. Additionally, the scan traffic closely resembles attack patterns, which can trigger IDS/IPS alerts and incident response procedures if security teams are unaware of the scheduled activity. Pre-notification allows operations and security teams to distinguish scan-generated alerts from real threats and avoid unnecessary escalation.

Vulnerability scans do not interact with backup systems or backup processes, and there is no mechanism by which a standard network or host scan would cause backup file deletion.

Vulnerability scanners are passive reconnaissance tools that probe for weaknesses but do not write to or modify application configuration files on target systems.

Vulnerability scans identify missing patches but do not apply them - patch application is a separate, manually initiated process, so the risk of untested patches being applied is not a reason for pre-scan stakeholder notification.