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SecurityWeb Dev2026

Web Application Security Checklist for 2026

👤 Vikram Singh 📅 January 8, 2026 ⏲ 9 min read 👁 4,400 views

Web application security breaches cost Indian businesses an estimated 17 crore per incident in 2025. Most of these breaches exploit well-known, preventable vulnerabilities. This checklist covers every critical security layer you need to address before going live.

Use this as a pre-launch security review. Items marked critical are non-negotiable before production.

OWASP Top 10 in 2026

  1. Broken Access Control 🔴
  2. Cryptographic Failures 🔴
  3. Injection (SQL, NoSQL, OS) 🔴
  4. Insecure Design
  5. Security Misconfiguration
  6. Vulnerable Components
  7. Identity and Authentication Failures 🔴
  8. Software and Data Integrity Failures
  9. Logging and Monitoring Failures
  10. SSRF

XSS (Cross-Site Scripting) Prevention

  • 🔴 Escape all output - never insert user data into HTML without escaping. React and Vue do this by default.
  • 🔴 Content Security Policy - restricts which scripts the browser will execute.
  • Use httpOnly and SameSite=Strict on session cookies.
httpContent-Security-Policy: default-src 'self'; script-src 'self' https://trusted-cdn.com; X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff X-Frame-Options: DENY

CSRF Protection

  • 🔴 SameSite=Lax or Strict cookies - blocks most CSRF attacks on their own.
  • Use CSRF tokens on all state-changing forms (Django handles this automatically).
  • Verify Origin and Referer headers on sensitive endpoints.

SQL Injection Prevention

  • 🔴 Always use parameterised queries or ORMs - never concatenate user input into SQL.
  • 🔴 Use the principle of least privilege for your database user.
python# Never do this cursor.execute(f"SELECT * FROM users WHERE email = '{email}'") # Always use parameterised queries cursor.execute("SELECT * FROM users WHERE email = %s", (email,)) # or via ORM User.objects.filter(email=email).first()

Authentication Security

  • 🔴 Hash passwords with bcrypt or Argon2
  • 🔴 Enforce 2FA for admin accounts
  • Rate-limit login endpoints at maximum 5 attempts per minute per IP
  • Use JWT short expiry (15 min) with refresh tokens in httpOnly cookies

Security Headers Checklist

  • ✓ Content-Security-Policy
  • ✓ X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
  • ✓ X-Frame-Options: DENY
  • ✓ Strict-Transport-Security: max-age=31536000; includeSubDomains
  • ✓ Referrer-Policy: strict-origin-when-cross-origin

Rate Limiting and Abuse Prevention

  • Limit all public endpoints - 100 req/min for anonymous, 1000 for authenticated
  • Implement CAPTCHA on login, register, and contact forms
  • Use Cloudflare WAF for Layer 7 DDoS protection
  • Log all 4xx/5xx responses and alert on anomalies

Ready to apply these strategies?

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