Cross Site Scripting (XSS) Attacks and Why We Should Care

Web applications are always becoming more and more complex. For many, trying to constantly push out new features as quickly as possible is causing security to be put at the back-burner of the development process. This could occur for a number of reasons including small development budgets, tight deadlines, and general unawareness of best security practices to name a few.

The result of not taking security seriously when developing software leads to vulnerabilities which put not only the organizations systems, but also potentially its reputation and customer's personal data at risk. This is largely the case when it comes to web-application vulnerabilities. There are many types of these vulnerabilities, but, for the sake of this article, we will cover a particular type of input validation vulnerability called Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) attacks.