OWASP Top 10 Compliance

Few are the organizations that truly recognize the importance of developing, deploying, and maintaining secure applications as part of their effort to mitigate security risks. Most companies remain stuck in the past by not following security best practices and allowing common vulnerabilities such as Cross-site scripting (XSS), SQL Injection, other security misconfigurations, and known vulnerabilities to be left unchecked. To make matters worse, most companies do not use any sort of framework or compliance guideline to help them achieve their security goals throughout their software development lifecycle. This is the precise reason that OWASP (Open Web Application Security Project) created the OWASP Top 10. The OWASP Top 10 has been constantly evolving since 2003 and is a simple classification of vulnerability classes aimed at defenders to help them easily understand common web application vulnerabilities and keep them out of their software both for the sake of security and compliance. While the Top 10 is not in and of itself a compliance or regulatory standard, it is however typically used either as an reference guide by other regulatory and compliance standards or as a framework by organizations who need to comply with regulatory or compliance standards such as PCI DSS, HIPPA, ISO 27001, and others. While knowing where to start could be overwhelming, setting policies and incentives based on eliminating OWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities is a great starting point – be it shoring up on injection attacks, broken authentication and session management, or even reducing sensitive data exposure. This is where Acunetix can help. Acunetix is a best-of-breed automated DAST web vulnerability scanner. Acunetix can scan hundreds of web applications for thousands of vulnerabilities, including OWASP Top 10 list of vulnerabilities, quickly and accurately supporting a vast array of technologies, including the latest and greatest JavaScript and HTML5 technologies.

With application security risks evolving so quickly, modern software security is full of complexities. As such, many legacy vulnerability scanners designed to scan websites built a decade ago can’t properly scan large and complex web applications quickly and accurately without security experts on staff. With a re-engineered core and a highly optimized crawler, every inch of Acunetix is tuned for speed, efficiency, and accuracy, allowing it to find vulnerabilities even in the largest and most complex of applications without breaking a sweat. What’s more, with Acunetix, it’s possible to throttle the speed at which a scan runs, ensuring that even high-traffic sites can be scanned without affecting their performance. You can also schedule compliance scans to run at specific times of a day, week, or month, or even define your own custom schedule. You also have the option of running scans on a continuous basis with Acunetix, only running a quick scan every day of the week, with a full compliance scan run once a week. This ensures that any new vulnerabilities that may have been introduced in-between full scans get picked up by Acunetix immediately.

Another problem that Acunetix solves, which many other external vulnerability scanners fall short of, is the ability to produce great reports. While Acunetix can provide you with an OWASP Top 10 compliance report, it doesn’t stop there. In addition to OWASP Top 10 compliance reports, Acunetix can also instantly generate a wide variety of other technical, regulatory, and compliance reports such as PCI DSS, NIST, and many others. Additionally, Acunetix also allows users to export discovered vulnerabilities to issue trackers such as Atlassian Jira, GitHub, GitLab, Mantis, Bugzilla, and Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS). One of the biggest issues with conventional web vulnerability scanners is that they simply report a list of vulnerabilities after a scan is complete. Acunetix takes a different approach in that once a vulnerability is found during a scan, it is automatically cataloged and assigned a status of Open. After the vulnerability gets fixed, Acunetix may be used to retest the vulnerability to make sure it’s properly fixed, and then automatically marks it as Fixed. All of this information is available at a glance in the Acunetix dashboard and thanks to multi-user, multi-role capabilities, security teams and other external security professionals can access exactly what they’re meant to.

Frequently asked questions

What is the purpose of the OWASP Top 10?

OWASP Top 10 is an open report prepared every four years by the OWASP Foundation (Open Web Application Security Project). This report contains a list of security risks that are most critical to web applications.

Learn more about the OWASP Top 10.

What are the OWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities?

OWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities are different in every report. The latest report lists the following: injections, broken authentication, sensitive data exposure, XML external entities, broken access control, security misconfiguration, Cross-site Scripting, insecure deserialization, using components with known vulnerabilities, and insufficient logging and monitoring.

See the vulnerabilities listed in the annual Acunetix web application vulnerability report.

What is OWASP Top 10 compliance?

OWASP Top 10 compliance measures the presence of OWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities in a web application. It is not a formal requirement like HIPAA or PCI DSS, but it is considered the best general measure of web application security for any business. Therefore, every vulnerability scanner should have an OWASP Top 10 compliance report available.

How to verify OWASP Top 10 compliance?

You can find most OWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities using Acunetix. However, some OWASP Top 10 categories include business logic vulnerabilities that you may only find through manual penetration testing – no vulnerability scanners and no other automated tools can find them. Therefore, to attain full compliance, you must start with vulnerability scanning and follow up with manual penetration testing.