Every year, OWASP — the Open Web Application Security Project — publishes a list of the ten most dangerous security risks for web applications. Most businesses in Ghana have heard of it. Very few have done anything about it. This article changes that.
Why this matters for your business
In the last two years, we've conducted security audits for businesses across Ghana, Côte d'Ivoire, and Nigeria. In every single engagement, we found at least three OWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities. Not because these businesses were careless — but because most software is written without security as a first-class concern.
The consequences aren't theoretical. Customer data exposed. Payment systems manipulated. Entire databases downloaded. These are things that have happened to businesses like yours.
1. Broken Access Control
The number one risk on the 2021 list (and still dominant). Broken access control means users can do things they shouldn't be able to — view other customers' data, access admin panels, modify records that don't belong to them.
Fix it: Enforce access control server-side on every request, not just in the UI. Check that the logged-in user owns the resource they're requesting. Never trust the client.
2. Cryptographic Failures
This covers storing sensitive data without proper encryption — passwords in plain text, customer data unencrypted at rest, transmitting data over HTTP instead of HTTPS.
Fix it: Use HTTPS everywhere (free with Let's Encrypt). Hash passwords with bcrypt or Argon2 — never MD5 or SHA1. Encrypt sensitive columns in your database.
3. Injection (SQL, Command, LDAP)
SQL injection is 25 years old and still one of the most common vulnerabilities we find. It allows an attacker to manipulate your database queries by injecting malicious code through form inputs or API parameters.
' OR '1'='1 as the password bypassed authentication entirely and logged in as the first user in the database — which was the admin account.
Fix it: Use parameterised queries or prepared statements. Never concatenate user input directly into SQL strings. Use an ORM if your framework provides one.
4–10: The Rest of the List
The remaining risks — Insecure Design, Security Misconfiguration, Vulnerable Components, Authentication Failures, Software Integrity Failures, Logging Failures, and SSRF — each deserve their own article. We'll cover them in our next posts.
Where to start
If you're a business owner without a dedicated security team, here's a practical 3-step starting point:
- Enable HTTPS on everything. No exceptions. If your site or API still runs on HTTP anywhere, fix this today — it's free.
- Audit your access control. Pick 5 URLs in your application that return data. For each one, ask: what happens if a logged-out user hits this? What if a different logged-in user hits this? The answers will surprise you.
- Get a penetration test. You don't know what you don't know. An external test on your customer-facing applications will surface real vulnerabilities — not theoretical ones.