In OWASP 2017, A9 Using Components with Known Vulnerabilities combines related risk themes across Vulnerable and Outdated Components, Software Supply Chain Failures. Vulnerable components add known exploitable flaws when outdated or unsupported dependencies are used. Supply chain failures introduce risk through compromised dependencies, build pipelines, or third-party services. These weaknesses are often exploited as a chain: attackers start with weak input or trust boundaries, pivot through authorization or session gaps, and then move toward data exposure, integrity loss, or service disruption. Operationally, this can increase incident frequency, enlarge blast radius, and raise both remediation cost and compliance exposure when controls are missing or inconsistently enforced across services.
For OWASP 2017 A9 Using Components with Known Vulnerabilities, apply defense in depth across design, implementation, deployment, and operations rather than relying on a single control. Priority controls include: Maintain SBOM visibility, patch quickly, remove unsupported libraries, and monitor vulnerability advisories. Audit dependencies, verify package provenance, scan continuously, and isolate build and deployment trust boundaries. Treat mitigation as a continuous program: define security requirements up front, enforce them in CI/CD gates, and verify effectiveness with threat modeling, code review, automated testing, and recurring penetration testing. Add monitoring and incident-response readiness so misconfigurations, abuse patterns, and control regressions are detected early and corrected before they become repeatable attack paths.
The same feature written the risky way, then with the fix applied.
How this risk has ranked in each OWASP release.
Rank by release (taller is higher)
2025Latest
#03A03 Software Supply Chain Failures
↑ Up 3 since 20212021
#06A06 Vulnerable and Outdated Components
↑ Up 3 since 20172017
#09A9 Using Components with Known Vulnerabilities
