OWASP Top 10 2025: What Changed in Web Security Vulnerabilities?
The OWASP Top 10 list is the industry standard for web application security. The 2025 update brings notable shifts in priorities driven by cloud architectures, microservices and the rise of SSRF attacks. This post walks through the new list alongside field lessons from the Diyarbakır VefaSec team.
A01 — Broken Access Control: Still Number One
Broken Access Control has led the list since 2021 and retains its position in 2025. Authorization failures account for roughly 40% of the findings we report on enterprise applications. IDOR, privilege escalation and missing function-level access control are the most common subcategories.
Prevention: re-authorize every request on the server, never trust client-side route guards, implement RBAC or ABAC policies as a centralized service and start with a 'deny by default' posture.
A02 — Cryptographic Failures: TLS and Encryption Mistakes
Formerly called 'Sensitive Data Exposure', this category now focuses on root cause: weak crypto. Use of TLS 1.0/1.1, MD5 and SHA-1 password hashing, weak random number generation and hardcoded encryption keys are the most common issues.
Argon2 or bcrypt for password hashing, AES-256-GCM for data encryption and KMS/HSM for key management are baseline 2025 requirements. TLS 1.3, ChaCha20-Poly1305 and X25519 form the modern stack.
A03 — Injection: SQL, NoSQL, Command Injection
Injection attacks are still seen in practice. While prepared statements and ORMs have largely solved classic SQL injection, unparameterized queries on NoSQL databases (MongoDB, Elasticsearch) create a fresh attack surface.
LDAP injection, XPath injection, OS command injection and SSTI (Server-Side Template Injection) fall into this category too. Every user input must be validated, context-aware escaped, and prepared/parameterized queries made mandatory.
A10 — Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF): The New Standout
SSRF has become a critical attack vector as cloud architectures have spread. An attacker can coerce the application into making internal requests to AWS metadata services, internal APIs or cloud consoles to steal credentials.
Prevention: URL allowlists, IMDSv2 enforcement, outbound control from private subnets, DNS rebinding protection and edge-case testing in URL parsers. On AWS, least-privilege IAM roles and VPC endpoints are also critical.
Enterprise Defense Checklist
Aim for OWASP ASVS L1 controls as a minimum: authentication, session management, access control, data validation, crypto, error handling and logging. Run automated ZAP or Burp scans plus manual code review before every release.
Target ASVS L2 for high-value applications and L3 for finance and healthcare. The VefaSec pentest package delivers compliance assessment against all three levels alongside a remediation guide.
Talk to VefaSec about your project or audit needs.
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