OWASP (the Open Web Application Security Project) publishes a list of the ten most critical web application security risks. Every development team and security professional uses it as a baseline reference.

As a founder or business owner, you don't need to understand the technical detail — but you do need to know enough to ask the right questions of your development team and to recognise when your product might be at risk.

A01: Broken Access Control

What it means: Users can access data or functionality they shouldn't be allowed to. A regular customer can view another customer's orders. A manager can access admin functions.

Real-world example: Changing a number in a URL (e.g., /orders/1234 → /orders/1235) shows someone else's order.

Ask your team: "Can a logged-in user access any data that isn't theirs by modifying a URL or API request?"

A02: Cryptographic Failures

What it means: Sensitive data is stored or transmitted without proper encryption. Passwords stored in plain text. Credit card numbers in an unencrypted database. Data sent over HTTP instead of HTTPS.

Ask your team: "Are passwords hashed with bcrypt or Argon2? Is all sensitive data encrypted at rest? Is everything served over HTTPS with a valid certificate?"

A03: Injection

What it means: Malicious input is interpreted as a command by the application. The most famous version is SQL Injection — where a user types SQL code into a form field and the database executes it, potentially leaking or deleting all your data.

Real-world consequence: An attacker empties your entire customer database with a single form submission.

Ask your team: "Do we use parameterised queries everywhere? Is all user input sanitised before it touches the database?"

A04: Insecure Design

What it means: Security flaws that are baked into the architecture, not just the code. The design itself allows attacks that secure coding can't fix.

Example: A password reset system that sends a reset link that never expires and works even after the password is changed.

Ask your team: "Did we threat-model the key user flows before we built them?"

A05: Security Misconfiguration

What it means: The code is fine but the server, database, or cloud infrastructure is configured unsafely. Default passwords left unchanged. Admin panels accessible from the public internet. Verbose error messages showing stack traces to users.

Ask your team: "Are default credentials changed? Is the admin panel IP-restricted? What do users see when there's an error?"

A06: Vulnerable and Outdated Components

What it means: Your application uses libraries, frameworks, or dependencies with known security vulnerabilities that haven't been patched.

Real-world risk: The Log4Shell vulnerability in 2021 affected millions of systems running a single unpatched Java library.

Ask your team: "Do we have automated dependency scanning? When did we last update our third-party libraries?"

A07: Identification and Authentication Failures

What it means: Weak authentication — no multi-factor authentication, weak password requirements, sessions that don't expire, or accounts lockout that doesn't exist (allowing unlimited password guessing).

Ask your team: "Do we support MFA? Do sessions expire? Do we rate-limit login attempts?"

A08: Software and Data Integrity Failures

What it means: Your application trusts data or code it shouldn't. Auto-updating from unverified sources. Deserialising untrusted data without validation.

Ask your team: "Do we verify the integrity of any data or code we pull from external sources?"

A09: Security Logging and Monitoring Failures

What it means: You have no way of knowing when you're being attacked — or when you've already been breached. No logs, no alerts, no monitoring.

Consequence: The average time to detect a breach is 206 days. Without logging, you'll find out from a customer or the press.

Ask your team: "What gets logged? Who gets alerted when there are unusual login patterns or errors? Have we ever tested our incident response?"

A10: Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF)

What it means: An attacker tricks your server into making requests to internal systems or other servers on their behalf — potentially accessing cloud metadata, internal APIs, or other protected resources.

Ask your team: "Do we validate and restrict URLs that users can provide as input to server-side operations?"

What to Do With This

You don't need to understand every technical detail. You need to be able to ask the questions above and get confident, specific answers — not "yes we handle security." If your development team can't answer these questions clearly, that's useful information.

iSocialize conducts OWASP-based security audits for web applications. See our audit packages or run a free automated scan on your site now.