Meet the future of AppSec: DAST-first application security

As organizations race to streamline development and get business-critical software to market faster, the need to secure web applications and APIs at scale has never been greater. Dev teams are working more quickly every year and can’t afford to wait around for security testing. And yet, the AppSec tools many rely on today haven’t kept up—especially in the realm of dynamic application security testing (DAST).

Traditional DAST tools on the market today still operate as disconnected point solutions. They focus on external website scanning and reporting, leaving the rest to overwhelmed AppSec teams. These tools generate volumes of data without validation, slow down developers with false positives, and fail to integrate cleanly into CI/CD workflows. They’re reactive, noisy, and make security a bottleneck.

At Invicti, we’re building on over two decades of DAST expertise to bring a strategic shift toward a DAST-first approach. This is more than just an innovative product direction. This is the modern way for organizations to embed security into the way they build, release, and scale software.

Traditional DAST no longer works

The vast majority of available DAST products were originally designed to operate as standalone tools to aid manual testing, not as automated parts of a fast-moving DevOps pipeline. They scanned production environments, flagged issues, and created long to-do lists for AppSec teams that had to sift through false positives before assigning issues to devs. That model doesn’t work anymore, and for multiple reasons:

• Too much noise: Without a way to verify exploitability, most DAST scanners overreport for fear of missing something important. This can mean scan results with hundreds of possible vulnerabilities—leaving security teams to sort through the noise because there could always be a critical issue hiding among the false alarms.
• Lack of integration: Many DAST tools don’t play well with modern dev pipelines, creating friction and slowing down releases. Unless designed from the outset for integration and automation, they still need to operate as standalone tools or risk flooding developers with non-actionable alerts.
• Point solution mentality: Standalone tools aren’t built to scale across large app portfolios or coordinate with other parts of the security ecosystem. This leads vendors who specialize in other approaches to application security to encourage the mindset that DAST simply doesn’t find anything and is more a checkbox than a serious tool.

The result? Security becomes a bottleneck or—worse—a tedious formality. Developers tune out. And risk piles up as exploitable vulnerabilities are almost certain to make it through to production. In fact, research has shown that 97% of DevSecOps teams ignore a real vulnerability at least once a month because they assume it’s a false positive.

Why DAST-first is the most effective way to do AppSec

Years ago, Invicti was the first to market a DAST that really worked at scale. Today, it is championing a DAST-first approach that goes a lot further. Being DAST-first isn’t about doing DAST alone—it’s about starting with the most accurate, scalable, and real-world-ready testing layer and tying the rest of your AppSec to this rock-solid foundation.

Going DAST-first with the Invicti platform gives you:

• Validated results: At the heart of Invicti’s DAST-first platform is the industry’s best scan engine that uses proof-based scanning to deliver 99.98% confirmation accuracy. This gets your teams immediately fixing real, exploitable vulnerabilities without guesswork or tedious manual verification.
• Dev alignment: We integrate directly into pipelines and ticketing systems with the industry’s biggest set of out-of-the-box integrations. When developers get real and actionable vulnerability reports directly in the trackers they use every day, security flaws become just another type of bug to be routinely fixed.
• Scalability by design: Invicti supports large, complex application and API environments across multiple teams and geographies. This isn’t a point tool to test a website here or there but a full AppSec platform that can span the entire DevSecOps process across your entire organization.
• The foundation of your entire AppSec program: DAST-first testing gives security teams an immediate, accurate picture of risk in production and staging environments. From there, you can layer in orchestration with other testing approaches, issue correlation, and risk-based prioritization to make sure your teams focus on issues that make the biggest difference.

Take charge of your AppSec with the first and only DAST-first platform

There are lots of ways to get an ineffective DAST, from legacy DAST vendors to SAST-first or network-first platforms throwing in a DAST as a compliance checkbox. In contrast, Invicti is purpose-built to lead with DAST. That means we start where the risk lives—in the running application—and help customers secure what matters most, faster and with less overhead.

With Invicti, you’re not just getting another scanner to throw in your toolbox. We’re delivering an AppSec platform that works across the SDLC, bridges gaps between security and development, and scales with your application environments and your whole organization. As a true platform, we do not limit the number of concurrent scans or the number of scan engines you can run. When you’re DAST-first, you can scan as much as you like and as often as you need on the only AppSec platform that is truly built for scale.

The future of DAST-first application security

At Invicti, we firmly believe DAST-first is the future of AppSec—but today’s platform is only the beginning. As we evolve and grow the platform, Invicti will continue to invest in:

• Expanding automation and orchestration to eliminate even more manual work
• Applying multi-signal correlation to use DAST as the fact-checker and force-multiplier for your SAST, SCA, and other security testing tools
• Building out existing risk-driven prioritization that focuses teams on what matters

We believe that accurate, automated DAST should be the foundation of every modern AppSec program. The future of security belongs to those who can move fast, ship safely, and scale confidently—and that future is DAST-first.