The 2025 OWASP Top 10: Addressing Software Supply Chain and LLM Risks With Cycode

The 2025 OWASP (Open Web Application Security Project) Top 10 signals a shift in application security priorities, with greater focus on software supply chain failures and large language model (LLM)-specific threats. As AI-driven development accelerates, security leaders need continuous, supply-chain aware controls that protect both human and AI generated code across the software development lifecycle (SDLC).

Cycode is an AI-native application security platform that provides unified visibility across source control, dependencies, continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD), and runtime to help reduce risk while minimizing developer friction. Treating the OWASP Top 10 as a shared language helps teams operationalize priorities and measure progress.

Key highlights

Use these points to operationalize the guidance and prioritize immediate actions.

• The 2025 OWASP Top 10 elevates focus on software supply chain security and expands to include LLM‑specific threats, reflecting the evolving application security landscape
• Aligning security programs with the latest OWASP guidance ensures resilience against both traditional and AI‑driven vulnerabilities
• Proactive supply chain and LLM risk management requires continuous inventory, automated testing, and policy‑driven controls across the SDLC

Cycode AI-native application security delivers unified, continuous protection and automated remediation mapped to OWASP Top 10 2025, helping reduce risk while preserving developer velocity.

What Is the OWASP Top 10?

The OWASP Top 10 is the industry’s most-referenced risks list for application security, used to align stakeholders on exposure, testing, and remediation priorities across web and application programming interface (API) surfaces OWASP Top 10. If you are asking “what is OWASP Top 10,” think of it as an awareness baseline that helps organizations translate threat trends into concrete controls and acceptance gates.

In practice, teams use the Top 10 list to drive code review patterns, penetration testing scope, dependency governance, and CI/CD policy. Because attackers exploit the same classes of weaknesses repeatedly, operationalizing the list allows leaders to iterate quickly on fixes that deliver the greatest risk reduction per unit of engineering effort.

Adopting a shared taxonomy cuts through debate and stabilizes execution: engineering and security map defects to OWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities, track coverage, and demonstrate control maturity during audits. The result is a plain-language communication bridge that supports prioritization, training, and continuous improvement.

Why Is Understanding OWASP Top 10 Vulnerabilities 2025 Important?

Understanding OWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities 2025 clarifies where adversary techniques and community guidance are converging. As AI features, open-source dependencies, and partner integrations become core to products, organizations need controls that span code, pipelines, and models.

Aligning with the 2025 guidance, and complementary lists like the OWASP API Security Top 10 2023 and the dedicated OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications, keeps programs resilient and audit-ready OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications, OWASP API Security Top 10 2023.

Modern defenses must adapt to AI misuse, dependency drift, and runtime exploitation patterns. Treating OWASP Top 10 2025 as a planning lens ensures you anticipate systemic risks, supply chain, identity, and data, rather than only patching isolated bugs.

What Are the Major Changes in the OWASP Top 10 for 2025?

As the community prepares for 2025, attention shifts from isolated flaws toward ecosystem risks that propagate across organizations. This means more emphasis on design, component governance, and pipeline integrity, not just input validation and session management.

Introduction of new risk categories

Expect increased focus on software supply chain integrity, insecure design, and AI/LLM misuse. That prioritization drives teams to harden dependency hygiene, build-and-release processes, and model integrations using secure development practices like the NIST Secure Software Development Framework (SP 800-218), also known as the Secure Software Development Framework (SSDF) NIST SP 800‑218 (2022). Mapping these controls to OWASP Top 10 for AI helps leaders measure coverage as model features scale.

Key differences from previous versions

Compared to earlier editions, the 2025 framing extends software supply chain security bring point vulnerabilities into architecture-level and component-centric risks. This end-to-end view is crucial for mitigating supply chain exposure and LLM behaviors that do not fit neatly into legacy categories OWASP Top 10. It also encourages shift-left testing paired with runtime observability so failures are prevented and detected quickly.

Impact on compliance and security programs

Policies, tests, and monitoring should explicitly cover AI/LLM usage, third-party components, and runtime telemetry. Adopting software bill of materials (SBOM) operations, validating supplier risk, and aligning with NIST SP 800-218 creates consistency between developer workflows and audit evidence OWASP Top 10, NIST SP 800‑218. This alignment streamlines proving adherence to OWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities 2025 while reducing manual overhead.

How Are Software Supply Chain Risks Impacting Application Security?

Supply chain weaknesses now affect every SDLC stage, from source control and build systems to artifact repositories and deployments. Attackers target dependencies, tools, and CI/CD because one compromise can spread rapidly across fleets and partners.

The business impact includes downtime, tampered releases, data loss, and expensive incident response. A defensible program inventories components, enforces provenance, and monitors pipeline integrity continuously.

Common supply chain attack vectors

The following points summarize practical steps teams should take.

Frequent vectors include compromised open-source libraries, malicious package typosquatting, tampered build steps, stolen signing keys, and over-permissive CI/CD integrations. Managing vulnerable and outdated components remains central to the OWASP Top 10 and requires automated inventory, verification, update processes, and enforcement in policy gates OWASP Top 10. Treat these as table-stakes for OWASP Top 10 web application vulnerabilities remediation.

Recent high-profile supply chain incidents

The Log4j vulnerability (CVE-2021-44228) demonstrated how a single widely-used component can create organization-wide exposure CVE‑2021‑44228 (NVD). However, the threat landscape has continued to evolve with more sophisticated, targeted attacks on the Software Supply Chain. These incidents directly illustrate why the anticipated OWASP Top 10 2025 elevates supply chain risk (A03) to a core concern:

• The Shai-Hulud Worm (npm, Sep 2025): This attack involved a self-replicating worm that compromised numerous npm maintainer accounts, stealing their credentials and then automatically injecting malicious code into over 500 downstream packages. This worm-like propagation, which also utilized a secret-scanning payload, demonstrated that attackers are moving from single-target compromises to automated, exponential supply chain poisoning at the registry level.
• The tj-actions Compromise (GitHub Actions, Mar 2025): A popular third-party GitHub Action, tj-actions/changed-files, was compromised when an attacker retroactively modified existing version tags to point to a malicious commit. This exploit injected a script that dumped sensitive CI/CD secrets (like API keys and cloud credentials) directly into the public workflow logs of over 23,000 repositories. This incident highlights the critical risk posed by CI/CD toolchain integrity and the danger of using mutable version tags.
• The XZ Utils Backdoor (Mar 2024): A long-term, sophisticated effort was discovered to inject a backdoor into the widely used open-source library XZ Utils, which is a dependency for SSH in many Linux distributions. The attacker patiently built trust over years before inserting the malicious code, aiming for widespread, near-universal compromise. This incident serves as the ultimate case study for Software Supply Chain Failures rooted in dependency trust and maintenance.

These patterns justify Software Bill of Materials (SBOM)-first workflows, mandatory signed builds and attestations, and continuous dependency risk monitoring. Implementing these controls is crucial for mitigating OWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities 2025 related to supply chain failures and maintaining a robust application security posture.

Strategies to reduce supply chain risk exposure

Track every component and service, enforce least privilege and signed builds, validate artifact integrity, automate dependency scanning, and monitor CI/CD behavior for anomalies. Embed these practices with SSDF-aligned controls to reduce blast radius and accelerate incident response NIST SP 800‑218. Aligning these tasks to OWASP Top 10 for LLMs and classic categories helps normalize remediation across human- and AI-generated code.

What Are the New Risks in the OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications?

The OWASP Top 10 for large language model (LLM) applications elevates prompt injection, data leakage, unsafe tool use, and supply chain issues unique to model development and integration OWASP Top 10 for Large Language Model Applications. Because models interpret untrusted inputs and may run with powerful connectors, guardrails must account for both content and capabilities. Referencing OWASP Top 10 LLM and OWASP LLM Top 10 clarifies threat categories for teams new to AI.

Understanding LLM-specific vulnerabilities

LLM systems process untrusted prompts, learn from mutable datasets, and frequently integrate with external tools and data. Traditional controls alone rarely neutralize these patterns, so policies should evolve in parallel with model capabilities and deployment architectures OWASP LLM Top 10. Aligning to OWASP Top 10 for LLM applications ensures testing and acceptance gates reflect real AI failure modes.

Model poisoning and data manipulation threats

The table below summarizes common model poisoning techniques, attack vectors, impacts, and mitigations.

LLM prompt injection attacks and their consequences

OWASP highlights prompt injection (LLM01) as a top risk where crafted instructions override system prompts, leading to data leakage or sensitive actions. Defenses include prompt isolation, least-privilege tool use, and output filtering aligned to the OWASP Top 10 LLM prompt injection category OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications. Use this guidance as the baseline for OWASP Top 10 LLM prompt injection prevention.

Securing LLM integrations in the SDLC

Treat LLMs as untrusted inputs: threat-model agent workflows, test prompts as attack surfaces, gate model tools with allow-lists, and monitor interactions at runtime. Fold these controls into CI/CD alongside standard application security testing to enforce consistent quality bars OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications. As the ecosystem matures, track OWASP Top 10 for Large Language Model Applications 2025 to keep policies current.

How Can Organizations Address OWASP Top 10 Web Application Vulnerabilities?

Reducing OWASP Top 10 web application vulnerabilities requires secure-by-design practices, automated testing, and fast feedback loops. Use the list as a shared language across engineering, security, and compliance to drive measurable risk reduction without bloated process.

Building a proactive AppSec program

Define ownership, adopt threat modeling for new features, and use a maturity framework to operationalize practices across teams. OWASP SAMM offers a structured model for governance, design, implementation, verification, and operations that aligns with OWASP guidance OWASP SAMM. Tie these activities to OWASP Top 10 for LLMs when AI features are in scope.

Leveraging automated security testing tools

Integrate static application security testing (SAST), dynamic application security testing (DAST), and software composition analysis (SCA) into CI/CD so issues are found and fixed before release. Pair automated tests with policy gates that block promotion when critical findings remain OWASP Web Security Testing Guide. Enforcing these controls stabilizes outcomes across OWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities.

The role of developer training and secure coding

Make secure coding part of onboarding and ongoing education. Reinforce patterns that prevent injection, authentication, and access control flaws, and provide fast feedback in IDEs and pull requests. Use real findings from your codebase to drive relevant, memorable learning OWASP Top 10.

What Are the Best Practices for OWASP Top 10 LLM Prompt Injection Prevention?

Preventing prompt injection requires layered controls that minimize attack surface and blast radius while retaining model utility. Align defenses to OWASP’s LLM guidance so mitigations are consistent and testable.

Detecting and filtering malicious prompts

Use classifiers and heuristics to flag suspicious instructions, context-switch attempts, and tool escalation; correlate prompts with session intent; and quarantine high-risk inputs before they reach sensitive tools OWASP LLM Top 10.

Implementing context-aware input validation

Constrain models with strict system prompts, validate inputs against expected schemas or intents, and restrict tool access by default. When possible, isolate untrusted content and apply filters on both input and output OWASP LLM Top 10.

Continuous monitoring for prompt-based attacks

Log prompts and tool calls, baseline normal behavior, and alert on anomalous action chains. Feed detections into incident response and update guardrails as new patterns appear OWASP LLM Top 10.

How Can Security Leaders Adapt to the OWASP Top 10 for AI Threats?

Leaders should align AI governance and controls with OWASP’s AI and LLM guidance while protecting delivery speed. Use OWASP LLM Top 10 as your baseline and expand coverage as model usage grows across products and teams.

Integrating AI threat intelligence into security workflows

Ingest AI-specific indicators and attack patterns into security information and event management (SIEM) and security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR), and tune detections for prompt injection, data exfiltration, and unsafe tool use. OWASP’s categories provide a common vocabulary to normalize detections and response playbooks OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications.

Aligning security policies with evolving AI risks

Codify policies for model acquisition, training data governance, evaluations, deployment, and runtime monitoring. Reference NIST SP 800‑218 for SDLC and map controls to OWASP guidance so accountability scales with usage NIST SP 800‑218. This approach helps you evidence adherence to OWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities 2025 and reduces audit toil.

The importance of unified, AI-native security platforms

Favor unified, AI-native security platforms that provide end-to-end visibility across the software supply chain, model lifecycle, and runtime. Centralized analytics and control reduce tool sprawl and align protections with OWASP Top 10 2025, the OWASP API Security Top 10 2023, and the OWASP LLM list—without adding significant developer friction.

If one compromised dependency can ripple across your entire fleet, how confident are you in your software bill of materials (SBOM) and CI/CD attestation controls?

Experience Next‑Generation OWASP Top 10 Security With Cycode

For organizations that treat supply chain and large language model (LLM) risk as mission-critical, consolidated, AI-native detection provides a practical approach to continuous verification. If you prioritize continuous, supply‑chain aware protection, Cycode consolidates detection and remediation across the SDLC.

Cycode provides unified SDLC security for human- and AI-generated code, offering continuous detection, automated remediation workflows, and supply chain visibility mapped to OWASP categories. This matters because fragmented tools can miss cross-surface risks and slow response; Cycode aims to reduce risk while preserving developer velocity by consolidating policies, insights, and remediation workflows without adding friction.

Book a demo today and see how Cycode can protect your organization across all OWASP Top 10 and AI‑driven application security risks. Book a demo