What Is the OWASP Top 10? The 2026 Guide for Developers
The OWASP Top 10 is an awareness document, not a checklist. Here's what it actually covers, what changed in the 2025 edition, and how to use it.
If you build or maintain a web application, you've probably encountered the OWASP Top 10.
It appears in security questionnaires, penetration-testing reports, developer documentation and compliance discussions. Security teams use it as a common language for talking about application vulnerabilities. Developers use it to understand the risks they should be designing against.
But what exactly is the OWASP Top 10 — and how useful is it for actually securing an application?
The OWASP Top 10 is an awareness document published by the Open Worldwide Application Security Project (OWASP) that describes the most critical categories of risk affecting web applications. OWASP describes it as a broad consensus around the most critical web application security risks.
The latest edition is OWASP Top 10:2025. It replaced the previous 2021 edition and changes several of the categories to reflect how application security has evolved.
For developers, the important point is that the OWASP Top 10 isn't a list of ten individual vulnerabilities to check off. It's a way of thinking about where applications commonly go wrong.
What does OWASP stand for?
OWASP stands for the Open Worldwide Application Security Project. It's a nonprofit organization focused on improving software security through open-source projects, community initiatives and education. Its projects include the OWASP Top 10, along with numerous security testing guides, cheat sheets and other application-security resources.
The OWASP Top 10 is one of its best-known projects because it provides developers, security professionals and organizations with a common vocabulary for discussing application security. Instead of simply saying that an application has an authorization problem, a security team can identify it as Broken Access Control, the A01 category. That common language matters when security issues have to move from a security report to an engineering backlog.
What are the OWASP Top 10 risks?
The current OWASP Top 10:2025 contains these ten categories:
| Rank | Category |
|---|---|
| A01 | Broken Access Control |
| A02 | Security Misconfiguration |
| A03 | Software Supply Chain Failures |
| A04 | Cryptographic Failures |
| A05 | Injection |
| A06 | Insecure Design |
| A07 | Authentication Failures |
| A08 | Software or Data Integrity Failures |
| A09 | Security Logging & Alerting Failures |
| A10 | Mishandling of Exceptional Conditions |
Several of the names will look familiar if you've worked with the 2021 edition, but the list isn't identical. That's intentional.
What's changed in the OWASP Top 10 2025?
The 2025 release reflects changes in the application security landscape since the previous edition. Security Misconfiguration moved from A05 in 2021 to A02 in 2025, reflecting its increased prevalence in the data used for the new edition. The previous Vulnerable and Outdated Components category has also expanded into Software Supply Chain Failures, covering a broader range of risks involving software dependencies, build systems and distribution infrastructure. OWASP also moved SSRF into the Broken Access Control category rather than maintaining it as a standalone Top 10 category.
That last point illustrates something important about the Top 10: the categories aren't permanent. They're updated as the technology landscape, attack techniques and available security data change.
Is the OWASP Top 10 a standard?
OWASP describes the Top 10 as a standard awareness document for developers and web application security — intended as a starting point for improving application security, not a complete security standard or testing methodology. It doesn't cover every possible vulnerability, and it isn't a certification or compliance framework on its own, though it's frequently referenced within broader compliance frameworks.
How should you actually use it?
The Top 10 is most useful as a shared vocabulary and a prioritization lens, not as a testing methodology by itself. A practical sequence looks like:
- Understand each category and where it typically shows up in your stack
- Test for the categories most relevant to your application — most teams don't need to weight all ten equally
- Fix what's found, prioritizing by real-world exploitability
- Keep testing as the application changes, since a clean result today doesn't guarantee one next month
How does Averto fit in?
The OWASP Top 10 gives teams a shared language for application risk. Averto turns that language into an ongoing testing process — continuously scanning for these categories, verifying which findings are actually exploitable, and helping teams prioritize fixes by real impact rather than working through an undifferentiated list.
OWASP Top 10 FAQ
What is the latest OWASP Top 10? The latest version is OWASP Top 10:2025. It replaces the previous 2021 edition.
Does OWASP Top 10 cover all vulnerabilities? No. OWASP explicitly describes the Top 10 as an awareness document and starting point, not a comprehensive list of every application security risk.
Can I use the OWASP Top 10 to test my application? Yes — the categories can structure security testing, but the Top 10 itself isn't a scanner. Different categories require different testing techniques.
What changed from OWASP Top 10 2021 to 2025? Security Misconfiguration moved to A02, Vulnerable and Outdated Components expanded into Software Supply Chain Failures, SSRF was incorporated into Broken Access Control, and Mishandling of Exceptional Conditions was introduced as A10.