OWASP Top 10 in 2026: What's Changed

First, what the OWASP Top 10 actually is — and is not

The OWASP Top 10 is a periodically updated awareness document that ranks the most critical categories of web application security risk. It is not a standard, not a checklist you certify against, and not updated every year. The last finalised edition is 2021. A revision has been in progress, with community data collection and a draft under discussion, and the security community has been debating what will move — but until OWASP publishes and finalises it, there is no official "2026" list, and anyone presenting one as settled fact is guessing with confidence.

So treat this as what it is: the current official Top 10 is 2021, and the shifts below are the well-supported directions the next edition is widely expected to reflect, driven by how applications are actually built now. Where something is anticipated rather than published, it says so.

The 2021 list, which is still the one that counts

If you are testing an application today, this is the framework to test against, because it is the one that is finalised:

• Broken Access Control — the number-one risk in 2021, and the one that shows up most in real engagements.
• Cryptographic Failures — weak or missing encryption of data in transit and at rest.
• Injection — SQL, command, LDAP; still present, now including cross-site scripting as a form of injection.
• Insecure Design — a category about flaws in the design itself, not the implementation.
• Security Misconfiguration — default credentials, verbose errors, unnecessary features left enabled.
• Vulnerable and Outdated Components — running dependencies with known CVEs.
• Identification and Authentication Failures — weak session management, credential stuffing exposure.
• Software and Data Integrity Failures — trusting code or data from untrusted sources, including insecure deserialization.
• Security Logging and Monitoring Failures — not seeing the attack while it happens.
• Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF) — added in 2021, reflecting how often modern apps fetch URLs on the server's behalf.

Broken Access Control sitting at the top is the single most useful thing in the list. It is not a subtle cryptographic flaw; it is "user A can read user B's data by changing an ID in the URL", and it is everywhere. If you test one thing thoroughly, test authorisation on every object your app exposes.

Where the next edition is widely expected to move

These are the pressures the community has been responding to. Read them as "what to start paying attention to", not as a published ranking.

Broken access control is not going anywhere. Every signal points to it staying at or near the top. The move to APIs and microservices has multiplied the number of places an authorisation check can be missing, not reduced it.

API-specific risks are the clearest growth area. Applications are now mostly API calls behind a thin client, and the failure modes have their own shape — Broken Object Level Authorization (the API version of "change the ID, read someone else's record"), excessive data returned in responses that the client then filters, and missing rate limits. OWASP maintains a separate API Security Top 10 precisely because this deserved its own document; anyone testing a modern app should read it alongside the main list.

Supply-chain risk has graduated from a subcategory to a headline. "Vulnerable and Outdated Components" was always on the list, but dependency-confusion attacks, compromised build pipelines and malicious packages pushed to public registries have made the software supply chain a first-class target. A Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) and pinned, verified dependencies are now baseline hygiene, not advanced practice.

AI-integrated applications are the genuinely new surface. Applications that embed large language models introduce failure modes that did not exist when the 2021 list was written — prompt injection (crafting input that overrides the model's instructions), training-data poisoning, and leaking sensitive context through the model. OWASP addressed this with a dedicated Top 10 for LLM Applications rather than folding it into the web list, which tells you both that it is real and that it is treated as its own domain. If your app has an LLM in it, that separate list is the one to test against.

How to actually test against any of this

The value of the Top 10 is as a coverage map: it tells you what kinds of flaw to look for, and you use tools to look. Against a real target that means combining automated breadth with manual depth:

• Broad web scanning — OWASP ZAP for an active crawl-and-attack pass across the app, and Nuclei for fast, template-based checks of known issues. These catch misconfiguration, outdated components and many injection points quickly.
• Injection testing — sqlmap for SQL injection specifically, once you have found a candidate parameter (the companion sqlmap guide covers this in depth).
• Server and configuration checks — Nikto for web-server misconfiguration and dangerous defaults.
• The manual half — access-control testing is mostly manual, because only you know that user A should not see user B's order. No scanner reliably finds "change the ID and you get someone else's data"; you find it by trying.

That last point is the one to internalise. Automated tools are excellent at the categories that have a signature — outdated components, misconfigurations, reflected injection. They are weak exactly where the number-one risk lives, because broken access control depends on knowing the application's intended rules. Scanners give you breadth; a human testing authorisation on every object gives you the finding that matters most.

The honest way to use this list

Test against the 2021 edition, because it is the finalised one. Watch the API, supply-chain and AI directions, because that is where the next edition is heading and where modern apps are actually breaking. And read the two companion lists — API Security Top 10 and the LLM Top 10 — if your application is an API or embeds a model, because the main web list was never designed to cover those in depth. When OWASP finalises the next Top 10, revisit; until then, anyone quoting a definitive 2026 ranking is ahead of the source.

Testing your OWASP coverage with CyberSec Pro

CyberSec Pro runs the tools above — OWASP ZAP, Nuclei, Nikto and sqlmap among the 88 in the catalogue — from a browser, on a generated form, with the command shown before it runs and the output streamed back. That covers the breadth half well: the categories a scanner can detect, run consistently and repeatably, with results you can diff between assessments. It does not replace the manual access-control testing that the top risk demands, and no tool honestly claims to. Use the automated scans to clear the ground quickly, and spend your own time where the scanner is blind — on whether your application actually enforces who is allowed to see what.