Developers: Don’t Make These Top 10 Security Mistakes in Your Applications
As a developer, you’re the first line of defense against data breaches. You should know what to look out for, and you have a responsibility to your users to follow best practices.
Luckily, there’s an organization dedicated to providing you with up-to-date guidelines for how to secure your web applications. Every web developer should know about the OWASP Top Ten.
The OWASP Top Ten Application Security Risks
The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) is a nonprofit dedicated to promoting security on the web. They’re an awesome organization, and they do a lot of research into the threats and exploits facing modern applications.
According to the experts:
Using the OWASP Top 10 is perhaps the most effective first step towards changing the software development culture within your organization into one that produces more secure code.
Following OWASP’s recommendations is the gold standard for security. If you’re a web developer, you need to know about OWASP and understand their top recommendations.
So, what are the biggest threats to your application?
1. Injection
Websites need to accept data from their users. They wouldn’t be very useful otherwise.
However, before you do anything with that data (store it, execute code on it, use it to look something up, etc), you need to make sure it’s cleaned and escaped of special characters.
If you don’t, attackers can potentially run their own code on your servers.
The best way to prevent injection is to use a library that sanitizes user entered data every time and as soon as user data hits your server. Every programming language for the web has tools & libraries to help sanitize inputs.
