How do you use the OWASP Top 10?

Direct answer

What a strong answer covers

How it works

The OWASP Top 10 is a ranked list of the risk categories most often found in web applications, such as broken access control, injection, and security misconfiguration. It is useful as a shared vocabulary, a training baseline, and a review checklist that maps each category to a place in the architecture and a test in the pipeline. It is not a threat model: it does not know about the application’s business logic, its specific data, or its non-web attack surface. Teams use it to make sure the common classes are covered by design and automation, then spend threat modelling time on the risks unique to their system.

Example

A team mapped the Top 10 onto their stack: access control is enforced by a policy layer with tests for every resource type, injection is prevented by parameterised queries verified by a linter rule, misconfiguration is caught by infrastructure policy checks, and vulnerable components by dependency scanning with SLAs. The threat model then focused on what the list does not cover: a coupon system that could be abused by combining legitimate discounts.

Common mistakes

• Treating a Top 10 checklist as proof that the application is secure.
• Reading the list once and never mapping it to concrete controls and tests.
• Ignoring business-logic abuse because it has no category in the list.

A useful answer structure

Answer from your own work.

Do not memorise a script: use only examples you can explain honestly in follow-up questions.