It occurs when an API uses excessive system resources, which can result in slowdowns, system failures, and increased operating costs. APIs without resource limitations can also result in denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. Discover the top 10 OWASP API security for 2025 to protect your APIs from vulnerabilities and ensure robust data security. The future of cybersecurity isn’t just about protecting human identities—it’s about understanding and securing the complex web of machine identities that power the digital world. Beyond identifying risks, OWASP provides actionable guidelines to enhance the security posture around NHIs.

Announcing the OWASP Gen AI Red Teaming Guide

An insecure CI/CD pipeline can lead to unauthorized access, introduction of malware, and other severe vulnerabilities. F5 also offers solutions to address the risks outlined in OWASP’s Automated Threats to Web Applications Project. Distributed Cloud Bot Defense maintains effectiveness regardless of how attackers retool, whether the attacks pivot from web apps to APIs or attempt to bypass anti-automation defenses by spoofing telemetry or using human CAPTCHA solvers. OWASP moved this to number one after discovering that 94% of the applications they tested had some broken access control after their 2017 list. Broken Access Control occurs when organizations don’t adequately enforce authenticated user restrictions.

This format allows us to track how prevalent each CWE is within the population of applications. We ignore frequency for our purposes; while it may be necessary for other situations, it only hides the actual prevalence in the application population. Whether an application has four instances of a CWE or 4,000 instances is not part of the calculation for the Top 10. This significant increase in the number of CWEs necessitates changes to how the categories are structured. Most CI/CD platforms are extensible through means of plug-ins or other third-party integrations.

AI Security Center of Excellence Guide

As a starter, you might want to focus on logging the most important transactions of your application exactly like you would prioritize writing end-to-end tests. In a bigger company, a more complete telemetry solution is a must-have, such as Open Telemetry, Sentry, or Datadog. Along with the implementation of zero-trust principles, environment isolation can mitigate the impact if and when incidents do occur involving NHIs. Given that we’ve historically struggled with this challenge, it is no surprise to see it on the OWASP NHI Top 10, and the exponential number of NHIs compared to human identities makes the problem even more severe. The world’s leading organizations rely on Splunk, a Cisco company, to continuously strengthen digital resilience with our unified security and observability platform, powered by industry-leading AI. “Snyk is proud to sponsor these latest OWASP findings that ultimately help to advance a shared mission to secure AI-generated code.

Understanding OWASP’s Top 10 list of non-human identity critical risks

It can also result in account takeovers and data leaks, making users easy targets for attackers. Broken Object-Level Authorization (BOLA) arises when API endpoints fail to check if the user has proper authorization for a specific object. Attackers can check or modify unauthorized data when APIs do not enforce object-level access rules. APIs run many requests for data objects, and if these requests are not checked properly, attackers can change them to get unauthorized access and manipulate other users’ data.

Resources For Further Learning

• They can direct the server to make requests to unauthorized internal services by manipulating the inputs.
• APIs without resource limitations can also result in denial-of-service (DoS) attacks.
• While environments may differ among organizations and development teams (e.g., Dev, Test, Prod, etc.), the fundamental principles of environment isolation are universally relevant.
• The OWASP Top 10 is a standard awareness document for developers and web application security.
• As organizations navigate an evolving and threatening digital landscape, it’s critical that we understand the potential security risks.

The rest of this article will focus on the long-running Top 10 for web app vulnerabilities, not including LLMs. The team expects to update it on a periodic basis to keep pace with the state of the industry. They will be working with the broader community to push the state of the art, and creating more educational materials for a range of uses. This document offers a best practices framework for teams, including cross-functional OKRs and KPIs, to streamline implementation. The updated 2025 LLM Top 10 highlights risks like Unbounded Consumption, Vector/Embedding RAG guidance, System Prompt Leakage, and more.

A04:2021 Insecure Design

Gen AI and LLMs require strong data security to prevent breaches and meet regulations. Vulnerable and Outdated Components, previously known as “Using Components with Known Vulnerabilities,” includes vulnerabilities resulting from unsupported or outdated software. Anyone who builds or uses an application owasp top 9 without knowing its internal components, their versions, and whether they are updated, is exposed to this category of vulnerabilities.

• These credentials can be used maliciously to impact environments, move laterally, introduce compromised code into the SDLC, and more.
• The OWASP Top 10 is a widely recognized list of the most critical web application security risks.
• OWASP is noted for its popular Top 10 list of web application security vulnerabilities.
• It reflects the changing threat landscape and highlights the need for constant vigilance and adaptation in the face of emerging threats.
• Know the worst threats and where they’re lurking in your systems, with this free guide.

In today’s digital age, web applications are the backbone of many businesses, providing essential services to millions of users worldwide. However, with the increasing reliance on web technologies comes the growing threat of cyberattacks. According to a report by Cybersecurity Ventures, cybercrime is expected to cost the world $10.5 trillion annually by 2025. This staggering figure underscores the importance of securing web applications against potential vulnerabilities. One of the most trusted resources for understanding and mitigating web application security risks is the OWASP Top 10.

Developer Guide (draft)

Due, in part, to high-profile breaches such as SolarWinds, the concept of software supply chain security has received increasing attention in recent years. This issue is especially pressing in the context of CI/CD as such environments interact with third-party code in multiple ways. Two such areas of interaction, the dependencies used by projects running within the pipeline and the third-party integrations and plug-ins with the CI/CD system itself will be discussed below.

The exact configuration will vary significantly depending on the CI/CD environment, SIEM platform, and other factors. For an overview of CI/CD observability within the context of the ELK Stack (a popular SIEM platform) refer to this article or reference this article for an alternative approach which can be readily adapted to a variety of CI/CD environments. It is important to keep in mind that SIEM alerts will never be 100% accurate in detecting CI/CD attacks.