The Most Overlooked OWASP Top 10 Risks in 2025

Munich, Germany - September 19, 2025

Why organizations still fail to address critical web vulnerabilities

Despite the widespread awareness of the OWASP Top 10, Rasotec's recent web application penetration tests show that many organizations still miss several of the most impactful risks. These oversights are rarely due to lack of knowledge. Instead, they stem from complexity, misaligned priorities, and overreliance on automated scanning tools.

The OWASP Top 10 represents the most common and critical web security risks. Yet even mature organizations often underestimate certain entries, leaving exploitable gaps. These overlooked risks are typically not technical configuration errors, but business logic flaws, access control issues, and insecure integrations that require human-led testing to detect.

Broken Access Control (A01:2021) remains the most consistently under-addressed risk in Rasotec's findings. Applications often rely on client-side checks or incomplete role enforcement, allowing privilege escalation, horizontal data access, or administrative actions without authorization. Automated scanners rarely detect these issues because they require contextual understanding of application logic.

Insecure Design (A04:2021) is another risk that organizations tend to ignore. Security is often bolted on after development rather than embedded from the start. This results in fragile authorization flows, unsafe trust boundaries, and missing security controls. Such flaws are invisible to static analysis and require threat modeling and manual assessment to uncover.

"Automated tools miss what attackers exploit most: logic flaws and design gaps. Our tests expose them before they become incidents," said Rick Graßmann, Chief Executive Officer at Rasotec.

Vulnerable and Outdated Components (A06:2021) are widely known but frequently downplayed. Teams assume package managers and container base images are up to date, but Rasotec often finds unpatched libraries or orphaned components running in production. Attackers exploit these gaps because they are predictable, well-documented, and easy to automate.

Security Logging and Monitoring Failures (A09:2021) are especially problematic during incident response. Without proper audit logs, organizations cannot detect or reconstruct attacks, leading to long dwell times. Rasotec often observes missing login audit trails, absent admin action logging, and no alerting on suspicious activity, giving attackers operational cover.

These findings highlight a recurring pattern: organizations invest in surface-level security measures but neglect structural weaknesses that require manual analysis. Automated tools play an important role, but they cannot evaluate business logic, contextual access rules, or design assumptions. Only targeted, human-led penetration testing can uncover these flaws reliably.

Rasotec's boutique approach focuses on deep, manual analysis of complex web applications, simulating real attacker behavior rather than relying solely on scanners to identify overlooked OWASP Top 10 risks that represent the highest real-world impact.

About Rasotec: Rasotec is one of CypSec's closest partners and a boutique security firm specializing in manual penetration testing of complex web, mobile, and infrastructure environments. Its team focuses on uncovering logic flaws, chained attack paths, and high-impact vulnerabilities that automated tools miss. For more information, visit rasotec.com.

Media Contact: Rick Graßmann, Chief Executive Officer at Rasotec - rick.grassmann@rasotec.com.