In depth
The OWASP Top 10 is the most widely cited application-security awareness document in the industry. Maintained by the Open Worldwide Application Security Project and refreshed on a three-to-four-year cadence (2017, 2021, 2026), each release ranks the ten categories of web vulnerability that organisations most need to defend against. Categories are derived from a combination of survey data, automated-scanning telemetry contributed by vendors, and the OWASP Foundation's analysis of CWE prevalence across hundreds of thousands of real applications.
The 2021 list — still in force as the canonical reference until the 2026 update lands — leads with Broken Access Control (A01), followed by Cryptographic Failures (A02), Injection (A03, now including SQLi and XSS), Insecure Design (A04, a new category for design-level flaws), Security Misconfiguration (A05), Vulnerable and Outdated Components (A06), Identification and Authentication Failures (A07), Software and Data Integrity Failures (A08), Security Logging and Monitoring Failures (A09), and Server-Side Request Forgery (A10). Each category links downstream to CWE entries, attack scenarios, and mitigation patterns.
The Top 10 is a starting point, not an end state. A pentest that only covers the Top 10 will miss most business-logic flaws, IDOR variants that are not in the categorisation, race conditions, and tenant-boundary breaks. The right way to use it is as the floor of an engagement scope: ASVS provides the comprehensive control set, the Top 10 is the executive-friendly summary, and CWE is the granular taxonomy for individual findings. OWASP also publishes sibling lists for APIs (API Security Top 10 — 2023), mobile (MASVS), LLMs (LLM Top 10 — 2025), and serverless.
Practically, every security finding in an AxVeil report includes both an OWASP Top 10 category (for the executive summary) and an ASVS control reference (for the engineering team). See OWASP Top 10 2026 checklist and OWASP LLM Top 10 explained.
The 2021 list — still in force as the canonical reference until the 2026 update lands — leads with Broken Access Control (A01), followed by Cryptographic Failures (A02), Injection (A03, now including SQLi and XSS), Insecure Design (A04, a new category for design-level flaws), Security Misconfiguration (A05), Vulnerable and Outdated Components (A06), Identification and Authentication Failures (A07), Software and Data Integrity Failures (A08), Security Logging and Monitoring Failures (A09), and Server-Side Request Forgery (A10). Each category links downstream to CWE entries, attack scenarios, and mitigation patterns.
The Top 10 is a starting point, not an end state. A pentest that only covers the Top 10 will miss most business-logic flaws, IDOR variants that are not in the categorisation, race conditions, and tenant-boundary breaks. The right way to use it is as the floor of an engagement scope: ASVS provides the comprehensive control set, the Top 10 is the executive-friendly summary, and CWE is the granular taxonomy for individual findings. OWASP also publishes sibling lists for APIs (API Security Top 10 — 2023), mobile (MASVS), LLMs (LLM Top 10 — 2025), and serverless.
Practically, every security finding in an AxVeil report includes both an OWASP Top 10 category (for the executive summary) and an ASVS control reference (for the engineering team). See OWASP Top 10 2026 checklist and OWASP LLM Top 10 explained.