During a target scan, Snyk API & Web goes through the target's URLs and interacts with every element found, filling out forms and clicking on buttons, among other actions, to perform extensive tests on your target to identify as many vulnerabilities as possible.
Due to the thorough interactions Snyk API & Web scans have with a target, you should expect many requests and an influx of information into the target.
There are 3 major components at play in a target scan, each one with a specific job:
The fingerprinter identifies the technologies used on the target
The crawler goes through the target's URLs and interacts with every element found, clicking on buttons and filling in forms, among other things
The scanner finds vulnerabilities within the target's URLs
A target scan has several possible states:
As soon as a scan is requested, it gets Queued; most of the time, it will start immediately
Once a queued scan begins, its state is changed to Started
After the fingerprinter, the crawler, and the scanner have completed their jobs, the scan ends and its state is set to Completed
There are some extra states:
If an ongoing scan is stopped by a user, the scan state is changed to Canceled
If the target is unreachable or there is a connection timeout, the scan ends with Failed, with a message indicating the error; the same state is used if a scan fails during its execution
If some vulnerabilities need to be manually confirmed by the Snyk API & Web team, the scan is set to Under Review; after this manual review, the scan changes to Completed
Once a scan is successfully finished, its scan reports and coverage reports can be generated.