Secure Web Development - OWASP Top 10 and Beyond

Explore why web security matters for safeguarding personal data, including PII and health information, and how breaches drive costly fines, lost revenue, and damaged trust.

Explore legal and regulatory compliance for web security, covering GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI DSS, and understand penalties, safeguards, and developers' roles in safeguarding data.

Examine major data breaches to show how neglecting patch management and vendor oversight causes financial losses and reputational damage, with Equifax and Target as key lessons.

Master the CIA triad—confidentiality, integrity, and availability—and apply practical web security practices, including MFA, TLS, AES, hashing, access controls, auditing, redundancy, and DDoS defense.

apply the least privilege principle and RBAC to assign permissions based on defined roles, with audits in an e-commerce scenario featuring admins, agents, and users.

Learn how secure by design embeds security into the development lifecycle from day one, using threat modeling, defined security requirements, and secure design patterns to reduce risk and build trust.

Apply defense in depth by layering physical, network, host, application, and data security to protect web applications; even if one layer fails, others safeguard sensitive data.

Explore the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP), its mission and top ten vulnerabilities, and practical resources like guides and the Zed Attack Proxy to build secure web applications.

Explore sql, no sql, and os command injection vulnerabilities and apply practical prevention techniques, including prepared statements, input validation, and least-privilege access to secure web apps.

Explore broken authentication, including brute force, credential stuffing, and session hijacking, and learn practical defenses like strong passwords, passwordless methods, MFA, secure cookies, and rate limiting.

Protect sensitive data by encryption in transit with https and at rest with strong algorithms. Apply robust access controls and secure vaults to prevent exposure.

Learn about XML external entities (XXE) vulnerabilities, including data theft, DoS, and remote code execution, and practical prevention through disabling external entity processing and input validation.

Explore broken access control and its role in unauthorized access to sensitive resources, data modification, or privilege escalation, and prevent it with rbac, server-side checks, unpredictable IDs, and auditing.

Master security misconfiguration by identifying default credentials, unprotected admin panels, and verbose errors, and prevent them with least privilege, strong credentials, regular updates and patching, security headers, and regular testing.

Explore cross-site scripting (XSS) and its stored, reflected, and DOM-based forms, including attacker techniques. Implement defenses with output encoding, CSP, and input sanitization to protect users and sessions.

Understand insecure deserialization and how attackers exploit untrusted data to trigger remote code execution. Apply validation, integrity checks, secure libraries, and object whitelisting to prevent manipulation and protect applications.

Identify the risks of using components with known vulnerabilities and implement secure dependency management by updating libraries, monitoring vulnerability databases, and using trusted, well-supported libraries.

Implement robust logging and real time monitoring to detect attacks, prevent data exfiltration, meet PCI DSS and HIPAA requirements, centralize secure logs with integrity monitoring and automate threat detection.

Discover how secure software testing identifies vulnerabilities early, ensures resilience, and protects user data across web, mobile, and IoT apps, using CSD and DSD tools.

Master static application security testing (SAST) to analyze code without execution, detect vulnerabilities like SQL injection, XSS, and buffer overflows early, and integrate with CI/CD pipelines for developer insights.

Explore dynamic application security testing (DAST) to test live running applications for vulnerabilities using black box techniques, focusing on broken authentication, misconfigurations, and insecure data handling in real world deployments.

Learn the basics of penetration testing, from planning and reconnaissance to exploitation and reporting, while applying ethical hacking principles and essential tools to strengthen security.

Explore how automated testing tools like OWASP Zap, Burp Suite, and Selenium boost web application security with speed, consistency, and scalability, plus ci/cd integration and multi-tool coverage.

Apply secure coding guidelines to prevent OWASP vulnerabilities through input validation, error handling, and secret management. Integrate OWASP Secure Coding Practices and SDL into CI/CD for secure web apps.

Define authentication and authorization, enforce strong passwords and hashing with bcrypt or argon2, enable MFA, apply OAuth/OpenID Connect for token-based access and secure sessions, enforce least-privilege via RBAC or ABAC.

Protect sensitive data with encryption, secure storage, and secure transmission using AES-256 and TLS. Emphasize data minimization, retention, API security, input validation, and data masking.

Apply updates via patch management, prioritize critical fixes, and use canary deployments for automated updates; monitor dependencies with Dependabot or Snyk, maintain version history, and ensure backups and recovery testing.

Build a simple, secure web application that defends against the OWASP Top 10 with a login flow using bcrypt, secure sessions, input validation, parameterized queries, and a protected welcome page.

Perform static and dynamic security testing on your web app using open source tools like Bandit, SonarQube, and OWASP ZAP. Identify and mitigate vulnerabilities in code and in running applications.

Explore static and dynamic scanning of a Python web app for OWASP vulnerabilities with Bandit and OWASP ZAP, identify SQL injection and XSS risks, and apply fixes.