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Yes—but mainly in how teams use it. OWASP has substantially revised the Top 10 in its current 2025 edition, adding and reshaping categories to reflect changing application-security risks. But the list is an awareness starting point, not a complete risk register or a security program by itself. Teams should use the updated categories to focus discussion and then build controls and assessment practices suited to their own systems.
What is the current OWASP Top 10?
The current released edition is OWASP Top 10:2025. OWASP describes the Top 10 as a standard awareness document for developers and web application security. Its categories are broad groupings of weaknesses, not ten isolated vulnerabilities or a ranked checklist that every application can apply identically.
- A01:2025 — Broken Access Control
- A02:2025 — Security Misconfiguration
- A03:2025 — Software Supply Chain Failures
- A04:2025 — Cryptographic Failures
- A05:2025 — Injection
- A06:2025 — Insecure Design
- A07:2025 — Authentication Failures
- A08:2025 — Software or Data Integrity Failures
- A09:2025 — Security Logging & Alerting Failures
- A10:2025 — Mishandling of Exceptional Conditions
What changed from the 2021 edition?
The 2025 list is an evolution, not a wholesale replacement. It retains several familiar risk areas while changing category scope, naming, and placement. OWASP’s 2021 edition provides the earlier reference point.
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- Supply-chain risk has broader scope. The earlier Vulnerable and Outdated Components topic is expanded to cover compromises in dependencies, build systems, and distribution infrastructure.
- SSRF is grouped under Broken Access Control. OWASP says Server-Side Request Forgery was rolled into that category rather than kept as a separate entry.
- Security Misconfiguration moves up: from fifth in 2021 to second in 2025.
- Two names signal revised scope: Authentication Failures and Security Logging & Alerting Failures replace the earlier category names.
These revisions make the 2025 edition the appropriate version to cite when discussing the current list. They do not mean the enduring categories have stopped mattering or that every organization faces risks in the same order.
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How does OWASP decide what makes the list?
OWASP calls the 2025 process “data-informed,” not blindly data-driven. Eight categories were selected from contributed testing data, while two could be elevated through a community survey. OWASP explains that testing data can lag emerging risks: a weakness may take time to become testable at scale, and some risks may never be represented reliably by automated testing. The survey adds practitioner judgment where the data may be incomplete.
For the 2025 edition, contributors supplied data on more than 2.8 million applications, according to OWASP’s introduction. That is the scope of the contributed dataset, not evidence that it represents all web applications. In the same introduction, OWASP reports that an average of 3.73% of applications tested had at least one of the 40 CWEs in the Broken Access Control category, and that 3.00% had one or more of the 16 Security Misconfiguration CWEs. Those figures describe applications in the contributed dataset; they are not estimates of prevalence across the entire web.
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The categories group multiple Common Weakness Enumerations (CWEs), which lets the framework account for differences across languages and frameworks. As a result, category rankings are useful signals about observed risks and priorities, not universal severity scores. What organizations test for influences what appears in the data, while survey input is intended to help account for less-visible risks.
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No. OWASP says the Top 10 lists are awareness documents intended to bring attention to critical risks in the topic they cover. Its project guidance treats the list as a starting point, not a comprehensive inventory of application-security risks or a substitute for a security program.
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| Use | What it can do | What it cannot do by itself |
|---|---|---|
| Awareness and shared vocabulary | Help developers and security teams discuss common risk areas using a recognizable framework. | Determine which risks matter most to a particular application or organization. |
| Initial review prompt | Suggest areas to investigate in design reviews, testing, and team training. | Prove that an application is secure or that all important risks have been checked. |
| Program planning | Highlight topics that may need controls, ownership, or further assessment. | Supply the processes, governance, measures, and maturity assessment needed for a sustained security program. |
For broader maturity assessment, OWASP points to approaches such as OWASP SAMM and DSOMM. These address program development beyond the awareness role of the Top 10.
What should a team do with the 2025 list?
- Use the 2025 category names. When updating training, checklists, or internal references, align them with the current edition rather than treating 2021 labels as current.
- Map categories to your application. Identify where each relevant risk could arise in your architecture, code, dependencies, build pipeline, and operations. A broad category is a prompt for context-specific analysis, not a requirement to apply the same control everywhere.
- Use testing and judgment together. Testing can surface measurable weaknesses; design review and practitioner expertise can help address risks that are hard to capture in available testing data.
- Connect findings to an ongoing program. Assign owners, define controls and follow-up, and use a maturity approach if you need to assess program capabilities beyond the list.
So, is it time to rethink the OWASP Top 10?
It is time to adopt the 2025 edition and to reconsider any expectation that the Top 10 can stand in for a full application-security program. The update responds to evolving concerns, but the framework’s own guidance remains clear: use it to raise awareness and start a risk conversation, then extend that work with application-specific assessment and broader program practices.
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