DAST reports should be more than lists of vulnerabilities – they should present practical security roadmaps that guide teams from detection to remediation. With Invicti, findings are validated, prioritized, and paired with clear remediation advice, helping developers and security teams act quickly and with confidence.
Key takeaways
Security testing is only as effective as your ability to act on the results. After all, merely running a test doesn’t fix anything. Especially when it comes to dynamic application security testing (DAST), interpretation is everything. Misinterpreting or overlooking a finding can lead to:
Whether you’re a developer seeing a DAST report for the first time, a tech lead managing team velocity, or a compliance auditor reviewing testing coverage, understanding what the report is telling you is key to AppSec success.
Especially for developers, vulnerability reports from security tools can feel like gibberish or (at best) opaque nitpicking that wastes their time. Invicti’s proof-based DAST removes the ambiguity and eliminates the back-and-forth to make going from scan to fix faster, clearer, and more reliable than ever.
DAST reports can look dense at first glance, but when broken into parts, they actually offer a structured and intuitive flow from risk detection to remediation.
Note that every DAST tool will produce slightly different results and several different report types are also usually available. The description below is mostly based on a full DAST scan summary report from the Invicti Platform, but you will find many of the same sections in other tools.
This section offers a high-level snapshot of the scan results, designed for engineering leads, managers, or compliance stakeholders who need to understand impact without diving into technical detail. It typically includes:
Use this section to assess overall risk posture and determine if further investigation is needed.
This is the heart of any DAST report. Each entry in this section outlines:
This is where developers and security engineers can understand the technical details behind each reported issue and start prioritizing work.
This section within the vulnerability findings is only provided in advanced tools such as Invicti that can automatically confirm vulnerabilities and extract proof that they are exploitable. When proof is available for a specific vulnerability, you’ll see:
Having proof removes the guesswork from triage, cuts down on discussions about whether a fix is needed, and helps teams move straight to remediation with confidence.
Simply reporting a security issue is not enough to ensure it is fixed. Any good scanner should also provide clear remediation guidance for each vulnerability, aligned (where relevant) to:
Instead of generic recommendations, the guidance should be actionable and developer-friendly to avoid multiple rounds of partial fixes and reduce back-and-forth between security and dev teams.
Apart from finding vulnerabilities, a DAST scanner and crawler also gathers a wealth of other information about applications and their tech stacks. A full scan report will provide that information alongside details of the specific scan settings. Depending on the tool, this section can include:
This data is essential for compliance documentation, repeatable testing, and investigating inconsistencies between scans. Depending on the tool, you can also get valuable security information that goes beyond actual vulnerabilities, such as best practices for secure configuration.
Not all vulnerabilities carry the same weight. Effective prioritization is about balancing technical severity, business impact, and exploitability. Here are the general steps for prioritizing DAST findings:
Reading and understanding a report is one thing; operationalizing it is another. Here’s how to make sure your team is extracting full value from DAST output.
A good DAST tool should integrate with all industry-standard dev and collaboration tools. For example, Invicti integrates with Jira, GitHub, GitLab, Azure DevOps, and more. This enables automatic ticket creation based on project or endpoint, so verified vulnerabilities go straight to the people who can fix them.
Track how long issues take to fix, which ones resurface, and whether severity levels decrease over time. These metrics help you measure AppSec maturity and demonstrate progress to stakeholders. Wherever possible, use automated fix retesting to eliminate ineffectual or partial fixes that will come back for rework.
Even the best DAST scanner won’t automatically map out every single aspect of your application environment. Dialing in the right scan settings and periodically revisiting them for updates and optimization can help prevent result gaps or inconsistencies. Common causes of scan problems include:
If something seems clearly off in the findings, check the scan metadata and settings. Any decent DAST tool should let you fine-tune scan policies to maximize coverage.
Security teams will typically get full scan reports and developers technical reports for specific vulnerabilities, but the tech-agnostic visibility a DAST tool provides is also valuable for other stakeholders. Need to share findings with auditors, external partners, or executives? Most tools will let you customize scan reports to some degree, with Invicti specifically providing a wide range of built-in specialized reports that you can export in PDF, JSON, XML, and other formats.
More than with any other security testing method, DAST reports have the potential to really drive action by highlighting issues that are accessible and exploitable at runtime. Leading tools like Invicti DAST that can automatically confirm vulnerabilities deliver on that promise by combining:Â
With Invicti DAST reports, your team doesn’t get a list of potential issues to add to their spreadsheet. They get a prioritized, validated roadmap to stronger application security.
No noise. No guesswork. Just clarity, confidence, and better software in the long run.
DAST isn’t just about finding vulnerabilities; it’s about helping teams fix what matters most, fast. And a report is only as good as its ability to communicate risk clearly. With Invicti, your reports:
If your team can read the report, they can fix the risk. And that’s how AppSec scales.
Next steps: