Top 10 2013-Risk

Attackers can potentially use many different paths through your application to do harm to your business or organization. Each of these paths represents a risk that may, or may not, be serious enough to warrant attention. Sometimes, these paths are trivial to find and exploit and sometimes they are extremely difficult. Similarly, the harm that is caused may range from nothing, all the way through putting you out of business. To determine the risk to your organization, you can evaluate the likelihood associated with each threat agent, attack vector, and security weakness and combine it with an estimate of the technical and business impact to your organization. Together, these factors determine the overall risk.

The OWASP Top 10 focuses on identifying the most serious risks for a broad array of organizations. For each of these risks, we provide generic information about likelihood and technical impact using the following simple ratings scheme, which is based on the OWASP Risk Rating Methodology.



Only you know the specifics of your environment and your business. For any given application, there may not be a threat agent that can perform the relevant attack, or the technical impact may not make any difference. Therefore, you should evaluate each risk for yourself, focusing on the threat agents, security controls, and business impacts in your enterprise. The names of the risks in the Top 10 stem from the type of attack, the type of weakness, or the type of impact they cause. We chose the name that is best known and will achieve the highest level of awareness.

OWASP OWASP Risk Rating Methodology Article on Threat/Risk Modeling

External FAIR Information Risk Framework Microsoft Threat Modeling (STRIDE and DREAD)