The OWASP Top 10 does not change dramatically between editions — which is precisely why the changes that do occur matter. They represent a genuine shift in what is being found in the wild, what developers are failing to fix, and where the risk is concentrating.
The 2025 update carries forward most of the 2021 structure but makes meaningful adjustments — particularly around API security, supply chain attacks, and server-side request forgery. Let us go through the list systematically.
The 2025 list at a glance
What is genuinely new in 2025
Prompt injection enters A03
The explicit inclusion of prompt injection in the injection category is the most significant conceptual change in the 2025 update. As companies integrate LLMs into their applications — customer support bots, code assistants, document processors — a new attack surface has emerged.
This is not a theoretical attack. Researchers have demonstrated prompt injection against production systems including document summarizers, email assistants, and customer service bots — sometimes achieving indirect injection through documents the LLM is asked to process.
Supply chain now explicitly in A06
The 2021 list mentioned supply chain briefly. The 2025 update makes it a first-class concern within A06, reflecting the reality that some of the most impactful compromises of recent years have been supply chain attacks — XZ Utils, SolarWinds, the npm package hijacking campaigns targeting developers.
Many programs now explicitly include supply chain in scope. Check whether a target's npm or PyPI packages are in scope — a single compromised dependency can be worth a critical finding across all applications that use it.
Deeper dives on key categories
A01: Broken Access Control — still the highest-yield category
Broken access control has been number one since 2021 and shows no sign of moving. It encompasses an enormous range of findings — from simple IDOR (changing user_id=123 to user_id=124 in an API call) to complex privilege escalation chains involving multiple roles and endpoints.
The reason it stays number one is structural. Access control is hard to test automatically and hard to implement correctly at scale. Every new feature, every new API endpoint, every new role is an opportunity for a mistake. Automated scanners miss most access control bugs because they require understanding the application's intended authorization model.
Where to look in 2025: Mobile API backends are particularly rich for IDOR. Mobile apps often expose raw object IDs in API responses that the web frontend abstracts away. API versioning endpoints (/api/v1/ vs /api/v2/) frequently have inconsistent access control — a check added to v2 is often missing from the older v1 endpoint that still works.
A10: SSRF — cloud makes this critical
SSRF existed before cloud computing, but the cloud made it critical. When you can force a cloud-hosted application to make a request to http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/, you can retrieve IAM credentials for the cloud instance — often leading to full AWS, GCP, or Azure account takeover.
How to update your testing methodology
The 2025 update suggests three concrete changes to how bug hunters should approach testing:
- Add prompt injection to every LLM-integrated feature. Any application that accepts user input and passes it to an LLM is potentially vulnerable. Test with direct injection, indirect injection through uploaded documents, and context escape attempts.
- Inventory third-party dependencies in scope. If a program's source is public or partially disclosed, check their package.json and requirements.txt against known vulnerability databases. Outdated dependencies in production are frequently in scope and frequently ignored by other researchers.
- Test API versioning systematically. For every endpoint you find on the current API version, check if
/v1/,/v0/, or/beta/equivalents exist. Authorization logic is frequently missing from older versions.
Use Dev-Decoder's Vulnerability Analyst tool to get an AI-powered OWASP mapping for any target domain. It cross-references your target's observable surface against all 10 categories and identifies which are most likely to yield findings based on detected technology stack.
Tools for each category
A brief practical reference for the categories most likely to yield bug bounty findings:
- A01 Broken Access Control — Burp Suite Pro (manual IDOR testing), Autorize extension, custom scripts for ID enumeration
- A03 Injection — SQLmap for SQL injection, Ghauri for modern WAF bypass, manual testing for prompt injection
- A05 Misconfiguration — Nuclei with misconfiguration templates, SecurityHeaders.io, manually checking cloud storage buckets
- A06 Outdated Components — Retire.js for JavaScript libraries, OWASP Dependency-Check, Snyk
- A10 SSRF — Burp Collaborator for out-of-band SSRF detection, manual testing of URL parameters and webhook endpoints
The OWASP Top 10 is most useful not as a checklist but as a mental model. Each category represents a class of design and implementation failures with predictable patterns. The researcher who deeply understands why each category exists — not just what it contains — will consistently find issues that surface-level testing misses.