Why Legacy DAST Fails for Modern Applications and How to Fix It

The text discusses the limitations of traditional Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST) tools when used to secure modern API-first applications, highlighting that these legacy tools were designed for server-rendered, HTML-based applications and are ill-suited for the dynamic nature of Single Page Applications (SPAs) and API-driven architectures. SPAs, which dynamically fetch data from backend services using JavaScript frameworks, render legacy DAST's crawling and form-based testing ineffective, as these tools fail to recognize API-driven interactions and modern authentication methods like OAuth 2.0 and JSON Web Tokens. The text argues that APIs now constitute the main attack surface, as they handle business logic directly, and attackers can exploit them without a user interface. StackHawk's modern DAST solution is presented as a tool that addresses these shortcomings by directly testing APIs using schema-based approaches, supporting stateful workflows, and integrating into CI/CD pipelines for continuous security testing, ensuring that all vulnerabilities, including those requiring complex authentication or multi-step workflows, are identified and addressed early in the development process.