Node.js Security Essentials: The Checklist I Use in Production
Every middleware, header, and validation rule that has actually stopped an attack — from a 7-year production record that includes one very expensive pentest. The pentest report arrived on a Tuesday. Eleven findings, eight of them high severity. The client — an e-commerce backend serving about 40,000 requests a day — had everything a checklist of this kind is supposed to prevent: an open CORS…
Every middleware, header, and validation rule that has successfully thwarted an attack in the author's 7-year production experience is compiled in this checklist. The checklist was created after a pentest report revealed eight high-severity issues, including an open CORS policy, SQL injection, a session token exposure, and a stack trace leaking database internals.
All of these vulnerabilities were easily preventable with standard, common middleware. The author shares this checklist with code samples and examples of failure modes to help others strengthen their Node.js production systems.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
