Well, this Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) is a type of non-profit organization that was founded in 2001. It was started with the goal of aiding the website owners and security experts guard web applications from cyber-attacks. OWASP has nearly 32,000 volunteers across the world who carry out security assessments and research.
Talking about OWASP Top 10, it is a hugely accepted document that prioritizes the most crucial security risks affecting web applications. Although there are various more than ten security risks, the idea behind the OWASP Top ten is to make security professionals intensely aware of at least the most crucial security risks, and learn how to defend against these.
Furthermore, OWASP periodically examines crucial kinds of cyber-attacks by four criteria: convenience of exploitability, detectability, prevalence, and business impact, and chooses the top 10 attacks. For your information, the OWASP top ten was initially published in the year 2003 and has since been getting updated in 2004, 2007, 2010, 2013, and even that of 2017. It has been going on like that to ensure utmost safety. For now, here are top security concerns and attacks that you may want to know about.
Injection
An injection vulnerability in any web application permit attackers to send hostile data to an interpreter, triggering that data to get compiled and executed on the server. A common kind of injection is known as SQL injection.
Broken Authentication
A web application along with broken or weak authentication may get easily detected by attackers and is susceptible to brute force/dictionary attacks and even that of session management attacks now, here a quick example would be of Credential stuffing, wherein attackers make use of lists of known passwords and try them successively to gain access. Without automated threat or credential stuffing protection, the application gets used by attackers as an authentication mechanism for any type of password they try.
Another example would be of password-based attacks. These web applications relying only on passwords have inherently feeble authentication mechanisms, even if passwords have really complexity requirements and are rotated. Organizations must definitely switch to multi-factor authentication for the best layers of security.
Sensitive Data Exposure
Well, sensitive data is characteristically the most valuable asset targeted by cyber-attacks. Attackers can easily gain access to it by stealing cryptographic keys, carrying out “man in the middle” (MITM) attacks, or even that of stealing cleartext data that could occasionally be stored on servers or even that of user browsers.
Here, an example would be like No TLS━if a website does not really use SSL/TLS for all type of pages, an attacker can easily monitor traffic, downgrade the connections from HTTPS to HTTP and even steal the session cookie.
Then there are also unsalted hashes where a web application’s password database may use unsalted or simple hashes to simply store passwords. If an attacker gets access to the database, they can easily and confidently crack the hashes, for example using GPUs, and get the access.
Conclusion
So, since you know somewhat about the concept of OWASP Top ten, make sure that you are going to make the most of it. The concept can be a good move for better safety in your organization.