What are potentially dangerous test and tests that perform active break-in attempts?

The potentially dangerous test setting allows the users to enable a set of plugins within the library of vulnerability checks, which may have a negative effect on the network, device, or application being tested.

Tests that perform active break-in attempts should be treated as an extension of Potentially dangerous tests as the main concept remains the same.

Some examples of the impact can be Denial of Service conditions, modification of applications, restarting servers, lock-outs, etc. Therefore, we recommend that the potentially dangerous tests and tests that perform active break-in attempts be used in a pre-production environment.

These categories include around 3000 plugins that aren't automatically performed when running a scan without those settings enabled.