What is a vulnerability?
A vulnerability is a hole or a weakness in the application, which can be a design flaw or an implementation bug, that allows an attacker to cause harm to the stakeholders of an application. Stakeholders include the application owner, application users, and other entities that rely on the application. The term “vulnerability” is often used very loosely. However, here we need to distinguish threats, attacks, and countermeasures.
Please do not post any actual vulnerabilities in products, services, or web applications. Those disclosure reports should be posted to bugtraq or full-disclosure mailing lists.
- Lack of input validation on user input
- Lack of sufficient logging mechanism
- Fail-open error handling
- Not closing the database connection properly
For a great overview, check out the OWASP Top Ten Project. You can read about the top vulnerabilities and download a paper that covers them in detail. Many organizations and agencies use the Top Ten as a way of creating awareness about application security.
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