ISC2 CISSP Practice Question

Automated vulnerability scanning is the best first step because it provides a systematic, comprehensive baseline assessment of potential security flaws with minimal disruption to the application. It efficiently identifies common vulnerabilities such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), and misconfigurations before proceeding to more resource-intensive and targeted testing methods. The scan results help prioritize further testing efforts and remediation activities. While the other options are valuable security practices, they either occur later in the testing process or address different aspects of security management that are not the most efficient first step for identifying vulnerabilities in a newly deployed web application.