Spidering is another term for mapping out or crawling a web application. This mapping exercise is necessary to uncover links, folders, and files present within the target application.
In addition to crawling, Burp Spider can also submit forms in an automated fashion. Spidering should occur prior to scanning, since pentesters wish to identify all possible paths and functionality prior to looking for vulnerabilities.
Burp provides an on-going spidering capability. This means that as a pentester discovers new content, Spider will automatically run in the background looking for forms, files, and folders to add to Target | Site map.
There are two tabs available in the Spider module of Burp Suite. The tabs include control and options, which we will study in the Getting ready section of this recipe.
