Government portals sit at an uncomfortable intersection: high public visibility, wide citizen usage, and often years-old codebases carrying legacy dependencies. That combination makes them a preferred target, and the OWASP Top 10 remains the most reliable lens for triaging where the real risk sits.
Broken access control continues to top the list in our own audit data — role checks implemented on the frontend but not re-verified server-side, or admin routes reachable simply by guessing a URL pattern. Injection flaws follow close behind, usually in older stored-procedure-heavy systems where input concatenation crept in during a rushed feature addition.
What changes engagement to engagement isn't the category of vulnerability — it's the blast radius. A broken access control issue on a district-level dashboard exposes different data than the same class of bug on a citizen-facing payment portal. That's why our reports rank findings by real-world exploitability and actual data exposure, not just a raw CVSS score.
The practical takeaway for any department running a public portal: budget for a testing cycle before every major feature release, not just once a year. Vulnerabilities introduced by a Tuesday deployment don't wait for your annual audit window to be found.