10-Point Security Checklist
Based on patterns from 400+ real security assessments. The most common issues we find — and how to prevent them.
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Where these ten points come from
This is not a generic OWASP restatement — the ten items are the findings that recur across real application assessments, ordered by how often they appear and how much damage they do. Broken object authorization, missing rate limits on authentication, security headers that never got deployed, secrets that leaked into client bundles: the list is a distillation of what actually gets exploited, not what looks good in a policy document.
How to use it
Go through it with someone who can answer honestly — not the optimistic answer, the deployed answer. Check each item against what is running in production today, not what is on the roadmap. Anything you mark unchecked is a concrete, fixable gap: most items map to a header, a middleware, or a single code path. The checklist is the cheapest hour of security work your application will ever get.
After the checklist
A clean pass means the commodity attacks fail — scanners, script kiddies, the lazy half of the threat landscape. What remains is the part that needs a human: business-logic abuse, chained authorization flaws, race conditions in payment and state-changing flows. That is what a manual assessment is for, and it is also why checklists and pentests answer different questions.
Checklist FAQ
Is this checklist a substitute for a pentest?
No — it is the baseline, not the audit. Passing all ten points means an attacker cannot take the cheap paths; it does not prove the expensive ones are closed.
Which item do teams fail most often?
Authorization on object access — the IDOR class. Almost every application checks login; far fewer check that the requested record actually belongs to the logged-in user.
How long does it take to work through?
An honest pass takes under an hour for a small app. Implementing what you fail is the real work — most items are a configuration change or a middleware, not a rewrite.
Does the checklist save my progress?
Progress stays in your browser. Nothing is transmitted or stored server-side — it is a working tool, not a lead form.