6 of the Spookiest Vulnerabilities from 2023

Since its formal recognition by the security community in 2007 on the OWASP Top Ten list, Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF) has stepped out of the shadows and joined the ranks of vulnerability all-stars like Cross Site Scripting (XSS) and SQL injection.

Antti Rantasaari and I will be delivering our presentation “Escalating Privileges through Database Trusts” at the National OWASP AppSec conference in Irvine, CA on September 10th.

XBOW tested Grok 4.7 on exploit crafting and agentic pentests: inside xAI's Build it improved substantially over 4.6, outside Build it slipped slightly—orchestration now matters as much as prompts.

NetSPI and Synack announced a KKR-backed merger combining nearly 40 years of offensive testing, arguing autonomous testing still needs human judgment to separate real risk from noise.

SaaS providers face rising API and multi-tenant threats; regular pentesting aligned to OWASP and PTES across the SDLC reduces breach risk and supports SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, and HIPAA.

APIs expose backend logic and sensitive data directly; targeted API security testing uncovers broken authentication, excessive data exposure, and access control flaws that traditional pentests miss.