Foundations of Web Application Security and the OWASP Top 10

Web application vulnerabilities cost organizations millions and expose sensitive data to malicious actors every day. Understanding how to identify, exploit, and remediate these security flaws is an essential skill for any modern developer, system administrator, or aspiring security analyst. This course guides you from foundational security concepts to a practical understanding of today's most critical web application risks. You will start by learning core security terminology, the basics of HTTP requests and responses, and how the web architecture operates from a security perspective. From there, you will explore the most critical vulnerabilities identified by industry standards, including injection flaws, broken authentication, sensitive data exposure, and modern security challenges like SSRF (Server-Side Request Forgery) and insecure API designs. What you'll learn: - Understand the core principles of web application security and common attack vectors - Identify and mitigate critical vulnerabilities listed in the OWASP Top 10 framework - Implement modern defensive coding practices, input validation, and secure output encoding - Configure secure headers, transport layer security, and robust authentication mechanisms - Apply threat modeling basics to anticipate and prevent security flaws before they are coded - Analyze real-world vulnerability scenarios through detailed written walkthroughs and code examples This text-based course is structured to build your knowledge step-by-step, starting with essential web protocols and security definitions before moving into detailed breakdowns of each vulnerability class and its remediation. You will study clear, written code examples showing both insecure implementations and their secure alternatives. This course is designed for beginners in web security, junior developers, and IT professionals who want to build a strong foundation in application defense. No prior security experience or programming background is required to get started. Begin your journey into web application security and learn how to write resilient, secure code today.