By Jackson Godwin  |  Cybersecurity Analyst & Penetration Tester  |  info@jacksontechnology.com.ng

Search for "OWASP Top 10 2026" and you will encounter a common misconception: there is no separate 2026 edition. The current and authoritative list is the OWASP Top 10:2025, released in late 2025 — the eighth edition since the project began in 2003 — and it remains the active standard throughout 2026. Most security professionals, developers, and procurement teams referring to "the 2026 OWASP Top 10" are, in practice, referring to this 2025 release.

What makes this edition significant is not just its rankings but its scale: the 2025 list was built from analysis of approximately 175,000 CVE records across 589 Common Weakness Enumerations — a substantial jump from roughly 400 CWEs analysed for the 2021 edition. Two brand-new categories appear for the first time, one long-standing category has been folded into another, and the overall emphasis has shifted decisively toward systemic risk: supply chains, configuration sprawl, and the messy reality of how modern applications actually fail in production.

For Nigerian enterprises in banking, fintech, oil and gas, and the public sector, the OWASP Top 10 remains the most widely referenced application security baseline — underpinning VAPT scope definitions, secure development training, and audit programmes aligned to ISO 27001:2022 and NDPA 2023 technical safeguard requirements. This post breaks down all ten categories, what changed, and what your security and development teams should prioritise.

The Full OWASP Top 10:2025 Ranking

The table below summarises the complete 2025 ranking alongside each category's 2021 position, making it easy to see where priorities have shifted:

Rank	Category	2021 Position	Status
A01	Broken Access Control	A01 (#1)	Unchanged — SSRF absorbed in
A02	Security Misconfiguration	A05 (#5)	Jumped up 3 places
A03	Software Supply Chain Failures	New	New category
A04	Cryptographic Failures	A02 (#2)	Dropped 2 places
A05	Injection	A03 (#3)	Dropped 2 places
A06	Insecure Design	A04 (#4)	Dropped 2 places
A07	Authentication Failures	A07 (#7)	Renamed, unchanged
A08	Software or Data Integrity Failures	A08 (#8)	Unchanged
A09	Security Logging and Alerting Failures	A09 (#9)	Renamed, unchanged
A10	Mishandling of Exceptional Conditions	New (replaces SSRF)	New category

Two changes stand out immediately: Security Misconfiguration's jump from fifth to second place, and the arrival of two entirely new categories — Software Supply Chain Failures and Mishandling of Exceptional Conditions — which together replaced the retired Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF) category. SSRF itself has not disappeared; its underlying weaknesses have been absorbed into Broken Access Control and Injection, reflecting how SSRF findings are actually classified during testing.

A01:2025 — Broken Access Control

Broken Access Control retains its position as the most serious application security risk for the fourth consecutive edition, with an average of 3.73% of tested applications exhibiting one or more of the 40 CWEs mapped to this category. Access control failures occur when users can act outside their intended permissions — viewing other customers' records, modifying data they should not be able to touch, or invoking administrative functions without authorisation.

• Common patterns: Insecure Direct Object References (IDOR), privilege escalation, CORS misconfiguration, and forced browsing to unauthenticated endpoints.
• Now includes SSRF: server-side requests that an attacker tricks an application into making on their behalf — often used to reach cloud metadata endpoints (e.g. AWS IMDS) and internal services.
• Remediation: enforce server-side authorisation checks on every request, apply least-privilege by default, deny access unless explicitly granted, and validate resource ownership before returning data.

A02:2025 — Security Misconfiguration

The most dramatic ranking change in this edition. Security Misconfiguration jumped from fifth place in 2021 to second in 2025, with 3.00% of applications exhibiting one or more of 16 related CWEs. The driver is cloud and container adoption: misconfigured S3 buckets, overly permissive IAM roles, exposed admin panels, default credentials left unchanged, and verbose error messages that leak stack traces and internal paths.

• Why it rose: as organisations automate deployment through Infrastructure-as-Code and CI/CD pipelines, a single flawed template or IAM policy gets replicated across every environment it touches — multiplying the blast radius of one mistake.
• Remediation: harden configuration baselines for cloud services, containers, and proxies; disable unnecessary features and default accounts; automate configuration drift detection; and review WAF and reverse-proxy rules regularly.

A03:2025 — Software Supply Chain Failures (New)

This is the headline new category for 2025, expanding what was previously the narrower 'Vulnerable and Outdated Components' category from 2021. Software Supply Chain Failures cover breakdowns or compromises anywhere in the process of building, distributing, or updating software — including malicious or vulnerable third-party dependencies, compromised build pipelines, and tampered package registries.

• Real-world drivers: high-profile dependency-chain attacks (malicious npm and PyPI packages, compromised CI runners, and tampered container base images) have made supply chain integrity a board-level concern.
• Remediation: maintain a Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) for every application, pin and verify dependency hashes, use Software Composition Analysis (SCA) tooling such as Snyk or OWASP Dependency-Check, and apply integrity verification (signing) to build artefacts.

For penetration testers: supply chain review now belongs in scope discussions alongside traditional VAPT. Clients should expect dependency audits and build-pipeline reviews as standard line items, not optional extras.

A04:2025 — Cryptographic Failures

Cryptographic Failures — known as Sensitive Data Exposure prior to the 2021 rename — has fallen from second place to fourth, reflecting genuinely improved industry practice: wider TLS adoption and stronger default cipher suites across frameworks and cloud platforms. That said, this category remains a top-tier risk and covers any scenario where sensitive data is exposed due to weak, missing, or misapplied cryptography.

• Common issues: hardcoded encryption keys, use of deprecated algorithms (MD5, SHA1, DES), missing encryption for data at rest, and improper certificate validation.
• Remediation: classify data by sensitivity and apply encryption in transit and at rest accordingly; use current, vetted cryptographic libraries rather than custom implementations; and manage keys through a dedicated KMS or HSM.

A05:2025 — Injection

Injection remains a perennial top-five risk, now encompassing SQL, LDAP, OS command injection, XML External Entity (XXE) attacks, and — increasingly — LLM prompt injection as AI-integrated applications proliferate. Despite being one of the longest-standing categories in OWASP history, injection vulnerabilities continue to appear in modern codebases, often introduced by AI-assisted coding tools trained on legacy code patterns that predate current security practices.

• Remediation: use parameterised queries and ORM frameworks consistently, validate and sanitise all input at trust boundaries, and apply context-aware output encoding.
• For AI-integrated applications: treat any user-controllable text that reaches an LLM prompt as untrusted input, and apply the same rigour as SQL injection prevention — input validation, output constraints, and least-privilege tool access for the model.

A06:2025 — Insecure Design

Insecure Design has dropped from fourth to sixth place — not because it matters less, but because design-level security thinking (threat modeling, secure architecture reviews, abuse-case analysis) has become more embedded in standard engineering practice across the industry. The category remains critically important for greenfield systems and new product lines, where security requirements must be defined before a single line of code is written.

• Remediation: integrate threat modeling into the design phase for new features, maintain a library of secure design patterns for common business logic (authentication, payments, file uploads), and conduct security architecture reviews before major releases.

A07:2025 — Authentication Failures

Renamed from 'Identification and Authentication Failures' in 2021, this category covers weaknesses in how applications verify user identity: weak password policies, missing multi-factor authentication, session fixation, and credential stuffing vulnerabilities arising from a lack of brute-force protections.

• Remediation: enforce MFA for privileged and customer-facing accounts, implement secure session management with proper timeout and invalidation, and apply rate limiting and account lockout policies on authentication endpoints.

A08:2025 — Software or Data Integrity Failures

This category addresses scenarios where code or data integrity is not verified — for example, applications that deserialize untrusted data without validation, auto-update mechanisms that do not verify digital signatures, or CI/CD pipelines lacking integrity checks on build artefacts.

• Remediation: implement digital signature verification for software updates and critical data, avoid insecure deserialization of untrusted input, and enforce integrity checks at each stage of the CI/CD pipeline.

A09:2025 — Security Logging and Alerting Failures

Renamed from 'Security Logging and Monitoring Failures', this category covers the absence of sufficient logging, monitoring, and alerting to detect and respond to breaches in a timely manner. Insufficient logging means breaches go undetected for months — a pattern repeatedly observed in major incident post-mortems.

• Remediation: log security-relevant events (authentication attempts, access control failures, input validation failures) with sufficient context for forensic analysis, integrate logs with a SIEM, and establish alerting thresholds with defined incident response procedures.

A10:2025 — Mishandling of Exceptional Conditions (New)

The second new category in this edition, Mishandling of Exceptional Conditions replaces SSRF in the tenth position. It covers applications that fail unsafely when encountering unexpected errors, edge cases, or resource exhaustion — exposing stack traces, entering inconsistent states, or bypassing security controls during error handling. The 2025 methodology required this category to demonstrate at least 24 CWEs with documented real-world exploitation, reflecting a more evidence-based approach to new category inclusion than some prior 'forward-looking' additions.

• Remediation: implement consistent, generic error handling that does not leak internal details to end users; ensure security checks (authentication, authorisation) cannot be bypassed via error paths; and apply fault-injection testing to validate behaviour under failure conditions.

Beyond the Top 10: AI and Agentic Application Risks

Alongside the core Top 10, OWASP now maintains separate, dedicated lists for AI-related risks that did not exist in earlier editions: a Top 10 for LLM Applications, addressing risks such as prompt injection and training data poisoning in AI-integrated systems, and a Top 10 for Agentic Applications covering autonomous AI systems — including risks like agent goal hijacking, tool misuse, and memory or context poisoning.

For Nigerian organisations beginning to deploy AI-powered customer service, fraud detection, or internal automation tools, these AI-specific lists are becoming essential companions to the core OWASP Top 10 — particularly as ISO/IEC 42001 AI governance frameworks increasingly reference them as part of operational risk controls.

What This Means for Nigerian Enterprises

The OWASP Top 10 underpins VAPT scoping, secure development training, and technical safeguard assessments across Nigerian banking, fintech, oil and gas, and public sector environments. The 2025 changes carry direct operational implications:

• VAPT scope updates: penetration testing engagements should now explicitly cover supply chain integrity (SBOM review, dependency audits) and exception-handling behaviour, not just traditional injection and access control testing.
• SAST/DAST tooling: static and dynamic analysis configurations should be reviewed to ensure rules map correctly to the 2025 categories — particularly SSRF rules, which now fall under A01 and A05 rather than a standalone category.
• Developer training: secure coding training tied to the OWASP Top 10 should be refreshed to reflect the new rankings — Security Misconfiguration's rise to #2 means cloud and container hardening deserve significantly more training time than in previous cycles.
• CBN, NDPA 2023, and ISO 27001:2022 alignment: technical safeguard requirements under these frameworks map closely to OWASP categories — particularly A02 (configuration), A04 (cryptography), and A09 (logging and monitoring) — making the Top 10 a practical checklist for technical control evidence during audits.

Practical first step: commission a gap assessment of your current VAPT scope, SAST/DAST rule sets, and developer training materials against the 2025 categories. Misconfiguration and supply chain failures are the two areas most Nigerian organisations are currently under-testing relative to their actual risk exposure.

Conclusion

The OWASP Top 10:2025 — commonly searched for as the 'OWASP Top 10 2026' — confirms a clear direction: application security is no longer just about code-level flaws. Supply chains, cloud configuration, and how systems behave under failure conditions are now central to how organisations get breached. Broken Access Control's continued reign at the top, after two decades of industry investment, is a sobering reminder that the fundamentals still matter most.

For Nigerian enterprises, the practical takeaway is straightforward: align your VAPT programmes, secure development training, and audit evidence frameworks to these ten categories, with particular attention to the two new entrants. Organisations that treat the OWASP Top 10 as a living baseline — rather than a static checklist — will be better positioned against both today's threat landscape and the AI-driven risks now emerging alongside it.

Jackson Technology provides VAPT services, secure development advisory, and compliance gap assessments aligned to the OWASP Top 10, ISO 27001:2022, and NDPA 2023 requirements for enterprise clients across Nigeria and Africa. Contact us to assess your current security posture against the 2025 standard.

About the Author   Jackson Godwin Cybersecurity Analyst & Penetration Tester   Jackson is a seasoned cybersecurity professional with over four years of hands-on experience in vulnerability assessment and penetration testing (VAPT), cloud security, GRC advisory, and data protection compliance. He leads Jackson Technology, a cybersecurity and data protection consulting firm serving enterprise clients across Nigerian banking, fintech, oil and gas, and the public sector. His advisory work spans ISO 27001:2022 implementation, NDPA 2023 compliance, AI governance, and OWASP-aligned application security testing.   Email: info@jacksontechnology.com.ng