Name the two high-level OWASP Top 10 categories you should consider in application security.

• A. Data Leakage and Cross-Site Scripting
• B. Injection and Broken Authentication
• C. Insecure Deserialization and Security Misconfiguration
• D. Broken Access Control and Cryptographic Failures

Answer: (B)

The two high-level OWASP Top 10 categories you should focus on are Injection and Broken Authentication. Injection flaws occur when untrusted data is used to construct commands or queries, allowing an attacker to change the behavior of the program, access or modify data, or execute unintended actions. This kind of vulnerability is highly pervasive across languages and data stores, making it a foundational concern in secure design and testing.

Broken Authentication covers weaknesses in verifying who a user is and managing their session, such as weak passwords, poor credential storage, and insecure session tokens. If authentication and session management are compromised, an attacker can impersonate users, gain unauthorized access, or take over accounts, which undermines all other security controls.

These two areas are emphasized because they directly impact who can access the system and what actions they can perform, representing some of the most dangerous and broadly applicable risk factors. Other options include important issues like data exposure or XSS, but they don’t address the same combination of pervasive command/query manipulation risks and identity/session control that these two do.