Board, I need to escalate and flag that the security issues I discovered on the new website in January remain unaddressed. With the original deadline, March 26the, arriving in two days, there has been no visible progress on remediation. In my opinion the current state of the new website represents an unacceptable level of risk.
Launching the new website with OWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities, including plain-text password and token storage, no MFA, no Google SSO, weak passwords such as 12345678 being accepted, stored XSS, and broken authentication and authorization flows, would be a major liability and could cause significant reputational damage to OWASP.
Based on my 20 years of experience of teaching secure coding and ASVS implementation, remediating these issues on a website with thousands of pages is not a 14-day task. It requires a re-design of the identity management logic, implementation of strict input validation throughout the source code and thorough regression testing.
Another big problem with the new site is broken/outdated content and formatting issues on Chapter and Project pages - this is being raised almost weekly on the OWASP Leaders list and Slack.
I strongly recommend that we postpone the go-live until a proper remediation roadmap is prepared and executed and verified step-by-step against our own OWASP ASVS and API Security standards.
Andrew, I am happy to volunteer my spare time to assist in explaining these issues to the vendor and advise on remediation.
Sam
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