Top 10 2013

Insecure software is undermining our financial, healthcare, defense, energy, and other critical infrastructure. As our digital infrastructure gets increasingly complex and interconnected, the difficulty of achieving application security increases exponentially. We can no longer afford to tolerate relatively simple security problems like those presented in this OWASP Top 10.

The goal of the Top 10 project is to raise awareness about application security by identifying some of the most critical risks facing organizations. The Top 10 project is referenced by many standards, books, tools, and organizations, including MITRE, PCI DSS, DISA, FTC, and many more. This release of the OWASP Top 10 marks this project’s tenth anniversary of raising awareness of the importance of application security risks. The OWASP Top 10 was first released in 2003, with minor updates in 2004 and 2007. The 2010 version was revamped to prioritize by risk, not just prevalence. This 2013 edition follows the same approach.

We encourage you to use the Top 10 to get your organization started with application security. Developers can learn from the mistakes of other organizations. Executives should start thinking about how to manage the risk that software applications create in their enterprise.

In the long term, we encourage you to create an application security program that is compatible with your culture and technology. These programs come in all shapes and sizes, and you should avoid attempting to do everything prescribed by some process model. Instead, leverage your organization’s existing strengths to do and measure what works for you.

We hope that the OWASP Top 10 is useful to your application security efforts. Please don’t hesitate to contact OWASP with your questions, comments, and ideas, either publicly to [mailto:owasp-topten@lists.owasp.org owasp-topten@lists.owasp.org] or privately to [dave.wichers@owasp.org dave.wichers@owasp.org].

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All of the OWASP tools, documents, forums, and chapters are free and open to anyone interested in improving application security. We advocate approaching application security as a people, process, and technology problem, because the most effective approaches to application security require improvements in all of these areas.

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