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…

Automated penetration testing goes a step further by actively exploiting vulnerabilities, making it more invasive and destructive than simply finding flaws.

Code review is a development-phase activity that requires source code access and is not a practical operational method for assessing running web applications at scale.

Manual penetration testing is too resource-intensive and time-consuming to systematically cover a large number of web applications.

Vulnerability scanning uses automated tools (such as web application scanners) to probe web applications for known flaws like SQL injection, XSS, and misconfigurations across all applications systematically. It is specifically designed to surface exploitable weaknesses that could allow an attacker to gain access to a network. For a company running many web applications, scanning provides broad coverage with actionable results without requiring source code access.