The OWASP Top 10 in simple language

I wrote a post for New Relic’s blog about trying to translate the OWASP Top 10 into the “simple” vocabulary used by xkcd’s Up Goer Five and Thing Explainer.

Broken Authentication: If bad guys pretend to be other people, and nothing stops them, they can see other people’s information and do bad things.

Insufficient Logging and Monitoring: If you don’t watch your computer system hard enough, or tell the computer to write down enough information about what it does, you won’t know if bad stuff happens to it.

The translations are fun, and I discuss what we can learn about making technical communication clearer and more accessible for a wide audience.

Explaining Security Risks with the 1,000 Most Common Words

Written on April 3, 2021