OWASP Top 10 Vulnerabilities Explained (2026 Edition)
A practical, plain-English guide to the OWASP Top 10 web application security risks and how to automate their detection.
Introduction to the OWASP Top 10
The Open Worldwide Application Security Project (OWASP) Top 10 is the globally recognized standard awareness document for developers and web application security. It represents a broad consensus about the most critical security risks to web applications.
1. Broken Access Control
Access control enforces policy such that users cannot act outside of their intended permissions. Failures typically lead to unauthorized information disclosure, modification, or destruction of all data.
Prevention: Implement access control mechanisms once and re-use them throughout the application, including minimizing CORS usage.
2. Cryptographic Failures
Previously known as Sensitive Data Exposure, this focuses on failures related to cryptography, which often lead to sensitive data exposure or system compromise.
Prevention: Encrypt all sensitive data in transit and at rest. Ensure up-to-date algorithms and strong keys.
3. Injection
Injection flaws, such as SQL, NoSQL, OS, and LDAP injection, occur when untrusted data is sent to an interpreter as part of a command or query.
Prevention: Use parameterized queries and object-relational mapping (ORM) tools.
4. Insecure Design
Focuses on risks related to design and architectural flaws. It calls for more use of threat modeling, secure design patterns, and reference architectures.
Prevention: Establish and use a secure development lifecycle with AppSec professionals to help evaluate and design security controls.
5. Security Misconfiguration
Security misconfiguration is the most common issue. This is commonly a result of insecure default settings, incomplete or ad hoc configurations, open cloud storage, misconfigured HTTP headers, and verbose error messages containing sensitive information.
Prevention: A repeatable hardening process makes it fast and easy to deploy another environment that is properly locked down.
6. Vulnerable and Outdated Components
If you do not know the versions of all components you use, you are likely vulnerable.
Prevention: Remove unused dependencies, features, components, files, and documentation.
7. Identification and Authentication Failures
When authentication, credential management, and session management are handled incorrectly, attackers can compromise passwords, keys, or session tokens.
Prevention: Where possible, implement multi-factor authentication to prevent automated credential stuffing and brute-force attacks.
8. Software and Data Integrity Failures
This relates to code and infrastructure that does not protect against integrity violations (e.g., plugins from untrusted sources, or CI/CD pipelines without sufficient access control).
Prevention: Use digital signatures or similar mechanisms to verify software or data is from the expected source and has not been altered.
9. Security Logging and Monitoring Failures
Without logging and monitoring, breaches cannot be detected.
Prevention: Ensure all login, access control, and server-side input validation failures can be logged with sufficient user context to identify suspicious accounts.
10. Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF)
SSRF flaws occur whenever a web application is fetching a remote resource without validating the user-supplied URL.
Prevention: Enforce "deny by default" network policies or network routing rules to block access to intranets or local systems.
How Exarlo Helps
Automated tools like Exarlo can continuously scan your public-facing infrastructure for symptoms of these underlying vulnerabilities, such as exposed admin panels (Access Control) or missing HTTP security headers (Security Misconfiguration).
Find your vulnerabilities before attackers do.
Our automated $149 security audit maps your public attack surface and checks for misconfigurations, outdated components, and missing security headers.
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