Overview

This course introduces the world of web application security using the OWASP framework, helping you understand how applications are attacked and how to defend them using secure coding and security best practices. You’ll begin by exploring how modern web applications are structured and how attackers identify and exploit vulnerabilities. The course familiarizes you with the OWASP Top 10 risk categories, common attack patterns, and real-world security challenges. From there, you’ll move into the practical side of security analysis, examining vulnerabilities such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), authentication flaws, and misconfigurations. You’ll learn how these vulnerabilities arise and how they impact application behavior, data security, and user trust. You will also gain hands-on exposure to dynamic security testing using OWASP ZAP, enabling you to analyze running applications, intercept traffic, and identify vulnerabilities through automated and real-time testing. The course then shifts to mitigation and defense. You’ll learn how to apply secure coding practices, implement proper input validation and output handling, and strengthen authentication, session management, and configuration security to reduce risk. By the end of this course, you will be able to: • Explain the fundamentals of web application security and the OWASP risk model. • Analyze common vulnerabilities such as injection attacks, XSS, and authentication flaws. • Identify how attackers exploit application weaknesses and assess their impact. • Perform dynamic vulnerability analysis using OWASP ZAP. • Apply secure coding techniques to prevent common web vulnerabilities. • Implement configuration hardening and defensive security practices. • Evaluate application risks and recommend structured mitigation strategies. Designed for aspiring application security professionals, developers, cybersecurity learners, and IT practitioners, this course provides a practical foundation for understanding and securing modern web applications. To be successful in this course, learners should have a basic understanding of web technologies and programming concepts. Start your journey into application security and learn how to identify, analyze, test, and defend against real-world web threats.

Syllabus

OWASP Risk Model and Core Web Vulnerabilities

Understand the OWASP risk landscape by analyzing core web application vulnerabilities and how attackers exploit them. Learn how to interpret OWASP Top 10 categories, identify common attack patterns such as injection and authentication failures, and map real-world exploitation techniques to application security risks.

Client-Side and Configuration-Based Vulnerabilities

Explore client-side and configuration-based vulnerabilities that commonly impact web applications. Understand how attackers exploit weaknesses such as XSS, XXE, insecure deserialization, and misconfigurations. Additionally, gain practical exposure to dynamic security testing using OWASP ZAP, enabling you to identify vulnerabilities in running applications through real-time analysis.

Course Wrap-Up and Assessments

This final module assesses your web application security skills through a roleplay-based, AI-graded assessment, where you identify vulnerabilities, analyze attacks, and apply OWASP principles using tools like OWASP ZAP, while reinforcing OWASP Top 10, web attacks, and secure coding practices.