Two recent studies have cast some light on the current state of web application security. How bad is it out there?  Bad. 82% of web sites had either a Critical, High, or Urgent vulnerability within the past calendar year, with Cross-Site Scripting being the most prevalent.

Once upon a time, Cross-Site Scripting was viewed as little more than an annoyance.  As the use of JavaScript has become something just short of ubiquitous, and its functions increasingly more complex, the risk to both web sites and users has expanded tremendously. And as the report shows, the problem is as much one of scale as anything.

What really stands out is that users used to have to worry about picking something up when visiting the 'red light' districts of the Internet. Now, it's the ‘branded' sites that are delivering malware. Attackers have realized that you can distribute a lot more malware from a national retailer's site than you can from a 'red light' site. There really is no safe harbor.

Compounding the issue are users themselves. If not taking the phishing bait, they are using the same password for multiple sites, making attacks against social networking sites which don't contain 'sensitive' information nevertheless effective.

For now, it's the same old story. Until web site owners start baking security into the Application Management Lifecycle, and users start thinking more about security, the Internet is going to continue to be a relatively unsafe place.