In the dynamic and complex world of cyber security, where new technologies and attack vectors emerge every now and then, it’s easy to lose track and not know where to focus your defense efforts. Fortunately, for more than two decades there has been a single, unchanging reference point that serves as a universal guidepost for developers, testers and security leaders around the world. We’re talking about the OWASP Top 10, published by the global nonprofit Open Web Application Security Project. It’s much more than just another list - it’s a decalogue of the most important risks facing modern web applications. The OWASP Top 10 list is not a theoretical, academic study. It is the result of an in-depth analysis of data collected from hundreds of thousands of real-world applications and security incidents. As a result, it provides a reliable and up-to-date picture of what vulnerabilities are most commonly exploited by attackers in practice. Analysis of the latest edition of this document provides an understanding of key trends and shifts in the threat landscape. It clearly shows that the battle for application security is moving from the level of simple bugs in code to the level of fundamental flaws in design, architecture and business logic.
Shortcuts
- What is the OWASP Top 10 project and why is it such an important standard in the industry?
- What are the most important changes and trends in the latest edition of the OWASP Top 10 list?
- Why was “Broken Access Control” ranked number one?
- What is the new threat on the list - “Insecure Design”?
- Why are “Vulnerable and Outdated Components” a ticking bomb in any application?
- How does nFlo use the OWASP Top 10 in its security tests and audits?
What is the OWASP Top 10 project and why is it such an important standard in the industry?
The OWASP Top 10 is a regularly updated, publicly available document that identifies and ranks the ten most critical risks to web application security. Its main goal is to raise awareness of the most serious threats and provide developers and organizations with a simple but powerful tool to prioritize their security efforts.
Its great importance in the industry is due to several factors. First, it is data-driven. The ranking is not the subjective opinion of a group of experts, but the result of statistical analysis of a huge amount of anonymized vulnerability data from penetration tests, code reviews and incidents from around the world. Second, it is technology-neutral and free, making it a universal standard, regardless of the programming language or framework used.
With its reputation and credibility, the OWASP Top 10 has become a de facto global standard and common language for the entire industry. Many regulations and standards (such as PCI DSS) directly reference it. For companies today, ensuring protection against OWASP Top 10 threats is the bare minimum and basic proof of cyber security due diligence.
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What are the most important changes and trends in the latest edition of the OWASP Top 10 list?
The latest edition of the OWASP Top 10 list (published in 2021, remaining the current standard) has brought some significant changes that perfectly reflect the evolution of the threat landscape.
The most important change is the rise of the “Broken Access Control” category to first place. This is a clear indication that the most common and serious problem is no longer sophisticated injection attacks, but fundamental flaws in authorization logic, allowing users to access data they shouldn’t see.
There are also three new categories on the list, which point to key modern challenges. “Insecure Design” (unsafe design) highlights that many vulnerabilities cannot be fixed at the code level because they stem from fundamental flaws in application architecture and logic. “Software and Data Integrity Failures” (software and data integrity violations) highlights threats related to supply chain and CI/CD processes. “Server-Side Request Forgery” (SSRF), on the other hand, is a category of technical attack that has gained prominence in the era of cloud and microservices architectures.
Why was “Broken Access Control” ranked number one?
The promotion of Broken Access Control to the top of the OWASP Top 10 list is the most important signal for the entire industry. It means that the most common way to compromise applications is no longer to “break” security, but to exploit existing but incorrectly implemented access control mechanisms. These attacks often do not require sophisticated technical knowledge, but only logical thinking and perceptiveness.
Vulnerabilities in this category cover a wide range of errors, including:
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The ability to circumvent permission verification by modifying parameters in the URL, allowing access to another user’s account or data (this is a de facto BOLA threat from the OWASP API Security Top 10 list).
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Escalation of privileges, that is, the ability of an ordinary user to perform actions reserved for the administrator.
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Disclosing metadata or sensitive files by forcing access to unsecured directories on the server.
The cause of these errors is most often the lack of a central and consistent mechanism for enforcing access control throughout the application. Instead, developers implement authorization logic in many different places, which inevitably leads to confusion and vulnerabilities. Protection requires implementing a “lock by default” policy and rigorously verifying authorization for every single data operation.
What is the new threat on the list - “Insecure Design”?
The appearance of the Insecure Design category at number four on the list is a revolutionary change in security thinking. This category focuses on flaws and risks that result from fundamental mistakes made at the design and modeling stage of application architecture, which cannot be “patched” at the level of the code itself.
This is a broad category that includes the absence or improper implementation of security-critical business processes. Examples?
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A ticket reservation system that does not have a mechanism to limit the number of tickets one user can add to a cart, allowing one bot to lock up the entire pool.
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An e-commerce application that does not have adequate safeguards against the mass creation of fake accounts or the publication of spammy reviews.
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A password reset process that is too simple and vulnerable to account takeover attacks.
Protecting against these threats requires threat modeling at an early design stage. This is a process in which architects and developers, in conjunction with security specialists, try to predict how a malicious user could abuse the application’s business logic, and then design appropriate defense mechanisms.
An overview of selected categories from the latest OWASP Top 10 list:
| Category (number and name) | Example of an attack | A key defense mechanism |
|---|---|---|
| A01: Broken access control | By changing the ID in the URL …/orders/123 to …/orders/124, the user accesses another customer’s order. | Rigorous verification of authorization for each object at each operation. Implementation of a central authorization mechanism. |
| A02: Cryptographic failures | Storing passwords in a database in plain text or using weak, outdated hash algorithms (e.g. MD5). | Use of strong, proven algorithms and cryptographic libraries. Secure key storage. Encrypting data in transit and at rest. |
| A03: Injection | The attacker injects a malicious piece of SQL into a form field, allowing him to read or modify the entire database. | Validation and sanitization of all user input. Use of parameterized queries (prepared statements). |
| A04: Insecure design | No limits in the business logic, allowing an attacker to add an infinite number of products to the shopping cart and lock up inventory. | Modeling threats at the design stage. Building abuse-resistant mechanisms into the application logic. |
Why are “Vulnerable and Outdated Components” a ticking bomb in any application?
This category, also known as Software Composition Analysis (SCA), has been at the top of the OWASP list for years. This is due to the fact that modern applications are overwhelmingly built from off-the-shelf, third-party components - libraries, frameworks and open-source modules. The risk is that if any of these hundreds of “building blocks” of which our application is composed contains a known vulnerability, our entire application automatically inherits that vulnerability.
Attackers actively and automatically scan the Internet for applications that use old, unpatched versions of popular libraries such as Log4j, Struts or jQuery. Exploiting such a vulnerability is often trivially easy and leads to full server compromise. It’s a ticking bomb because development teams are often not even fully aware of all the components and “dependencies of dependencies” that their software uses.
The only effective defense is to implement an automated dependency management process. This requires having an accurate inventory of all components (known as Software Bill of Materials, or SBOM) and regularly scanning them automatically for known vulnerabilities (CVEs). SCA tools, integrated into the CI/CD pipeline, can automatically detect and block the use of vulnerable libraries before they even hit production.
How does nFlo use the OWASP Top 10 in its security tests and audits?
At nFlo, the OWASP Top 10 standard and more specific documents such as the OWASP Web Security Testing Guide (WSTG) and the Application Security Verification Standard (ASVS) form the foundation and backbone of our application security testing methodology. We don’t treat this list as a mere checklist, but as a strategic map that guides our efforts and allows us to focus on the risks with the greatest potential impact on a client’s business.
Our penetration testing services for web, mobile and API applications are designed to systematically and thoroughly verify resistance to all categories on the OWASP Top 10 list - and much more. Combining automated scanners with advanced manual techniques, our team of ethical hackers specializes in detecting complex business logic flaws, such as Broken Access Control and Insecure Design, that are invisible to automated tools.
We also offer Secure Code Reviews, during which our experts analyze application code for vulnerabilities at the source, helping developers fix bugs and build best practices. As part of our DevSecOps consulting services, we help organizations “shift security to the left” by integrating automated tools (SAST, DAST, SCA) directly into their CI/CD pipelines to ensure continuous verification against OWASP threats at every stage of the software development lifecycle.
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