A Complete Beginner Guide To Web Application Security

Learn how injection attacks exploit user input to execute unauthorized database commands, and how to prevent them with prepared statements, a safe API, input validation, and least-privilege access.

Explore how broken authentication arises from weak session management and credential stuffing, brute force attacks, and learn to prevent access with multifactor authentication and proper session invalidation.

This lesson explains sensitive data exposure, its impact on organizations handling personal information like credit card and health data, and how encryption in transit, data classification, and regulations prevent leaks.

Understand how external entity attacks exploit XML parsers to access local data and sensitive information, and prevent them by patching libraries and validating user input.

Explore broken access control and authorization failures, showing how unauthorized users access restricted data and functions. Learn how to prevent breaches by denying access by default and limiting privilege escalation.

Understand how security misconfiguration arises from human error and improper configurations, exposing applications through unnecessary features and verbose error messages. Learn to prevent such issues with automated tools.

Explore how cross-site scripting allows attackers to inject scripts via untrusted input stored in databases, steal cookies, and how sanitizing input and encoding output mitigates the risk.

This lesson explains serialization and deserialization, insecure deserialization, the risk of tampering and remote execution, and how to prevent it by avoiding deserialization of untrusted data and using digital signatures.

Explore how vulnerable components expose web applications to threats, learn to identify known vulnerabilities, monitor dependencies, and apply timely patches to reduce risks from vulnerable components.

Understand the risks of insufficient logging and monitoring in web application security, and learn how 24/7 monitoring, proper log configuration, and alerting help detect and block brute force attempts.

Wrap up this course on web application security, guiding you to identify vulnerabilities as a penetration tester or security analyst and to better secure applications.