1. Top 10 risks in application security include injection flaws, cross-site scripting, broken authentication and session management, insecure direct object references, cross-site request forgery, security misconfiguration, failure to restrict URL access, and unvalidated redirects and forwards.
2. Injection flaws occur when untrusted data is sent to an interpreter, allowing attackers to execute unintended commands. Cross-site scripting occurs when raw user input is embedded in web pages. Broken authentication allows session hijacking. Insecure direct object references allow access to unauthorized data.
3. Developers can avoid these risks by using prepared statements or input validation, output encoding all data, limiting database privileges, adding secret tokens to forms, and