What is OWASP and what are some of its key projects?

OWASP (Open Worldwide Application Security Project) is a non-profit that publishes free, vendor-neutral tools, standards, and guidance for building secure software — its best-known output is the Top 10 list of web app risks.

Why it matters: web security advice is otherwise scattered and often tied to a vendor selling a product. OWASP fills that gap with community-driven, openly licensed resources that developers and auditors worldwide treat as a common baseline. Concretely, if you need to know how to do something securely, there's usually an OWASP Cheat Sheet for it; if you need to test an app, there's ZAP.

Key projects:

• Cheat Sheet Series - Security best practices
• Dependency Track - Component vulnerability monitoring
• OWASP SAMM - Software Assurance Maturity Model
• SecurityShepherd - Security training platform
• Security Knowledge Framework (SKF) - Security requirements
• ZAP - Web application security scanner
• ModSecurity Core Rule Set - WAF rules
• Top10 - Most critical security risks

Go deeper:

• OWASP (Wikipedia) — encyclopedic overview of the foundation, its history, and its flagship projects.