SATAN captured the attention of a broad technical audience, appearing in PC Magazine[1] and drawing threats from the United States Department of Justice.
[1] It featured a web interface, complete with forms to enter targets, tables to display results, and context-sensitive tutorials that appeared when a vulnerability had been found.
SATAN was written mostly in Perl and utilized a web browser such as Netscape, Mosaic or Lynx to provide the user interface.
As well as reporting the presence of vulnerabilities, SATAN also gathered large amounts of general network information, such as which hosts are connected to subnets, what types of machines they are and which services they offered.
Results suggest[3] that SATAN has been replaced by nmap, Nessus and to a lesser degree SARA (Security Auditor's Research Assistant), and SAINT.