No programmer is perfect, but some mistakes are more dangerous than others. While some mistakes might just slow down your site, others can open up vulnerabilities that expose your code, your database and even your users to all manner of attack.

To help you identify the more serious errors common in programs of all types, a group of top software security experts in the US and Europe have released their Top 25 Most Dangerous Programming Errors.

Unsurprisingly, cross-site scripting vulnerabilities and improperly handled SQL top the list of common and dangerous mistakes. Remember kids, sanitize your database inputs; you just never know when someone is going to name their child: “Robert’) DROP TABLE Students;”

While not all the errors in the list are common in web programming, some of the more serious things are concerns for web developers — cross-site request forgeries, missing encryption of sensitive data and unrestricted file uploads are all common web programming issues.

Also interesting is the weaknesses by language section, which breaks down common mistakes in PHP, Java, Perl and C/C++. No doubt web developers would like to have seen Python and Ruby in that list, but it should at least be useful for PHP and Perl programmers.

See Also:

• OAuth Security Exploit Tests Limits of Open Web Standards
• Warning: This Site May Be Sharing Your Data
• Google Wants Global Privacy Rules