Understanding OWASP Top 10: Key Web Security Risks and Mitigation Strategies

OWASP Top 10 project analyzes web application security threats and vulnerabilities, combining technical and business impact assessments to produce a widely recognized ranking of the ten most severe risks, along with recommended mitigation strategies.

The Top 10 is a highly distilled output intended to help developers, security testers, and web security management teams raise risk awareness, and it also guides security vendors in enhancing product capabilities.

For web security risk management and enterprise security building, there is no silver bullet; it is advised to compare the list (noting that OWASP consistently stresses “don’t stop at the OWASP Top 10”) with your own environment, identify the main risk factors affecting your applications, and implement focused protective measures across people, processes, and technology.

OWASP TOP10 2017 RC2 includes:

A1 – Injection

A2 – Broken Authentication and Session Management

A3 – Sensitive Data Exposure

A4 – XML External Entity (XXE) Injection

A5 – Broken Access Control

A6 – Security Misconfiguration

A7 – Cross‑Site Scripting (XSS)

A8 – Insecure Deserialization

A9 – Using Components with Known Vulnerabilities

A10 – Insufficient Logging & Monitoring