OWASP Category Mapping: Triaging Security Findings the Standard Way

OWASP Category Mapping organizes security findings into OWASP Top 10 categories so they are easier to triage and report. It runs as part of a normal scan and shapes how security signals appear in your results. This article is for security leads, developers, and anyone who reports on risk to stakeholders.

What it does

The mapping takes security findings produced during a scan and assigns them to the relevant OWASP Top 10 category. Instead of a flat list of issues, you get findings grouped by a widely recognized industry taxonomy, which makes the shape of your risk immediately legible.

Why it matters

Raw security findings are hard to prioritize because they lack a shared frame of reference. The OWASP Top 10 is the lingua franca of application security: auditors, executives, and engineers all understand it. Mapping findings into those categories lets you see whether your risk concentrates in, say, injection or access control, and lets you report progress in terms stakeholders already trust. It also makes it easier to compare risk across projects and over time using a consistent scheme.

For leaders, OWASP categories are a board-ready summary. For developers, they group related issues so fixes can be batched by root cause.

How to act

Scan the repository:

vg

Review findings grouped by OWASP category. Prioritize the categories with the most or the most severe findings, and address them by theme rather than one finding at a time — issues in the same category often share a root cause. Use the categories to structure your remediation plan and your reporting.

Generate a shareable report for stakeholders:

vg report

Triage tips

• Fix by category, not by individual finding, to address shared root causes.
• Use OWASP groupings to communicate risk to non-engineers.
• Track category-level trends over time to show measurable progress.

Related

OWASP mapping builds on the Security Posture Scanner and the Security Scanners Scanner. For exportable evidence, see the SBOM workflow and the Supply Chain Inventory guide. For output options, see the Output Formats guide.