Learn the hack - Stop the attack

WebGoat is a deliberately insecure application that allows interested developers just like you to test vulnerabilities commonly found in Java-based applications that use common and popular open source components.

Learn in 3 steps


Goals


Web application security is difficult to learn and practice. Not many people have full blown web applications like online book stores or online banks that can be used to scan for vulnerabilities. In addition, security professionals frequently need to test tools against a platform known to be vulnerable to ensure that they perform as advertised. All of this needs to happen in a safe and legal environment.

Even if your intentions are good, we believe you should never attempt to find vulnerabilities without permission. The primary goal of the WebGoat project is simple: create a de-facto interactive teaching environment for web application security. In the future, the project team hopes to extend WebGoat into becoming a security benchmarking platform and a Java-based Web site Honeypot.

More information


For more information about running WebGoat / FAQ see our wiki pages.

Interested in contributing to WebGoat, take a look at our issues.

Explain the vulnerability


Teaching is now a first class citizen of WebGoat, we explain explain the vulnerability. Instead of 'just hacking' we now focus on explaining from the beginning what for example a SQL injection is.

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Learn by doing


During the explanation of a vulnerability we build assignments which will help you understand how it works.

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Explain mitigations


At the end of each lesson you will receive an overview of possible mitigations which will help you during your development work.

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