With the new version of the famous OWASP Top 10 on the horizon, it’s a great time to talk about its true purpose, how it fits into application security, and ways we can best leverage it. It feels like a lot of people have lost sight of the original goal of this list, so let’s dive in!
The OWASP Top 10 as an Awareness Tool
The OWASP Top 10 is often the first security resource web developers encounter. It lists what the OWASP community considers the most critical web application security risks, based on extensive industry research and reported incidents. It’s a fantastic tool to guide developers toward good security practices—but if you’re a bug bounty hunter or pentester, it might not be your most useful roadmap.
OWASP states:
"The OWASP Top 10 is a standard awareness document for developers and web application security. It represents a broad consensus about the most critical security risks to web applications."
This focus on "awareness" is crucial. The primary audience is developers who need an introduction to common security pitfalls, such as injection flaws, broken authentication, and misconfigurations. By naming the ten most critical issues at a given point in time, OWASP effectively steers developers’ attention to the vulnerabilities that matter most right now. As a result, the Top 10 has become a foundational piece of security education in many development teams.
A Negative Signal for Security Researchers?
For bug bounty hunters, pentesters or security researchers, it’s almost a given that these high-level categories aren’t the only places to find vulnerabilities. In fact, the success of the OWASP Top 10 means developers are now more aware of these categories and often mitigate them proactively. As a researcher, that can act as a "negative signal"—if a company heavily promotes its "OWASP Top 10 compliance", it likely has already addressed the most obvious security bugs.
That doesn’t mean these issues never crop up—unfortunately, they still do—but "following the OWASP Top 10" isn’t the same as being secure. Truly thorough testing is about going deeper: analyzing custom logic, design flaws, unusual third-party integrations, and obscure framework quirks that lie beyond the OWASP categories. In other words, go where developers haven’t been taught to look yet.
Version Changes: XXE as an Example
The ongoing updates to the Top 10 offer good insights into how certain issues evolve. For example, XML External Entities (XXE) used to have its own dedicated category in the 2017 version but is now wrapped into Security Misconfiguration in the 2021 version. This shift makes sense—many frameworks have disabled entity support by default, making XXE less common as a standalone bug class.
But from a security researcher’s point of view, it’s also a clue. If a vulnerability is no longer singled out, developer awareness of it may go down over time—potentially leaving an opening for attackers to exploit it. This highlights how changes in the Top 10 can actually help you decide where to look more aggressively.
Why It Still Matters for Security Testers
Even if your primary focus is hunting deeper, less-common vulnerabilities, knowing the Top 10 is still important. If you’re assessing a new, relatively immature codebase, there’s a decent chance it contains these "usual suspects" in some form. Each environment is different, so keeping an eye on these categories helps ensure you don’t miss low-hanging fruit.
Additionally, professional pentests often have formal requirements around the OWASP Top 10. Clients may request a test specifically covering those categories, or you might need to reference them explicitly in your findings. For compliance-driven organizations, "Top 10 coverage" can be a big deal—so it’s good to be fluent in that language while still pushing beyond it.
Going Beyond the OWASP Top 10
One of the best ways to surpass the basics is to focus on technology-specific pitfalls. Modern frameworks and libraries have unique features (and misfeatures) that can lead to vulnerabilities not explicitly listed in the Top 10. Tracking emerging or re-emerging bug classes—like prototype pollution, race conditions or complex business logic errors—can reveal issues that common checklists don’t cover.
It also pays to dive deeper into architecture-level flaws. Problems like insecure caching mechanisms or subtle parameter tampering can slip past both scanners and standard "Top 10" audits. Understanding how frameworks work under the hood—and how developers might be using them incorrectly—can expose flaws that most dev teams never knew to guard against.
Conclusion
Ultimately, the OWASP Top 10 is a phenomenal resource for exactly what it was designed for: educating and raising awareness among web developers.
For pentesters, researchers, and bug bounty hunters, it’s useful as a sanity check and a common language to discuss issues with clients—but it’s far from the entire security picture. Once developers fix or mitigate the most visible risks, deeper investigation is needed to uncover unique, highly impactful vulnerabilities that lie beyond what a Top 10 list can capture.
If you’re solely relying on the OWASP Top 10, you risk missing some of the most interesting and damaging flaws. Recognize the Top 10 for what it is—an awareness tool—and then use your expertise to go one step further. That’s where the real discoveries happen.
And as the OWASP Top 10 continues to evolve—shedding older categories, combining or renaming others—its value as a reference remains, but it’s still up to researchers to stay current and look beyond what most developers are already watching for.
