{"slug": "i-scanned-20-nigerian-developer-projects-for-security-vulnerabilities-here-s-i", "title": "I Scanned 20 Nigerian Developer Projects for Security Vulnerabilities, Here's What I Found", "summary": "A developer building DeadZone, an AI-powered vulnerability scanner, interviewed 16 Nigerian developers and scanned their live projects, finding widespread security gaps. Most projects lacked Content Security Policy headers, exposed WordPress admin panels, left debug consoles enabled in production, and had session cookies missing security flags. The findings highlight systemic security weaknesses in the Nigerian tech ecosystem.", "body_md": "Before I wrote a single line of product code, I did something most founders skip entirely.\n\nI talked to 16 developers. Then I scanned their projects.\n\nWhat I found changed how I think about security in the Nigerian tech ecosystem and probably the African tech ecosystem more broadly.\n\nThe Setup\n\nI'm building DeadZone, an AI-powered vulnerability scanner for developers who aren't security experts. The idea is simple: paste your URL, get a plain English report showing exactly what's broken, what an attacker can do with it, and how to fix it.\n\nBefore I could build that, I needed to understand the real landscape. So I ran structured interviews with developers building fintech platforms, healthcare apps, edtech tools, games, and general web applications. Then I scanned their live projects.\n\nHere's what I found.\n\nFinding 1: Almost Nobody Has a Content Security Policy\n\nSeverity: Medium\n\nOut of every project I scanned, the vast majority were missing a Content Security Policy header entirely.\n\nWhat this means in plain English: your site has no instruction telling browsers what content is allowed to load on it. An attacker who finds an XSS vulnerability can inject malicious scripts into your pages and run them in your visitors' browsers, stealing session tokens, redirecting users to fake login pages, or silently exfiltrating data.\n\nWhy does this keep happening? Firebase Hosting, Vercel, and most hosting platforms don't set CSP headers by default. You have to configure them explicitly. Most developers never do.\n\nThe fix for Firebase, add this to your firebase.json:\n\njson\n\n{\n\n\"hosting\": {\n\n\"headers\": [{\n\n\"source\": \"/(.*)\",\n\n\"headers\": [{\n\n\"key\": \"Content-Security-Policy\",\n\n\"value\": \"default-src 'self'\"\n\n}]\n\n}]\n\n}\n\n}\n\nFinding 2: WordPress Admin Panels Left Wide Open\n\nSeverity: High\n\nSeveral projects were running WordPress with the admin panel publicly accessible and no additional protection layer. No IP restriction, no two-factor authentication, no rate limiting on login attempts.\n\nWhat this means: a basic brute force tool can hammer your login page thousands of times per minute. Given that millions of leaked username and password combinations exist from previous data breaches, a determined attacker will get in.\n\nI found WordPress installations where the admin URL was the default and trivially discoverable, login attempts were not rate limited, and error messages confirmed whether a username existed, helping attackers narrow down valid accounts.\n\nThe fix:\n\nChange your admin URL using a plugin like WPS Hide Login. Enable two-factor authentication. Limit login attempts using Limit Login Attempts Reloaded which is free. Block your admin panel by IP if your team works from fixed locations.\n\nFinding 3: Debug Consoles Left Exposed in Production\n\nSeverity: Critical\n\nThis one genuinely surprised me.\n\nI found live production applications with debug consoles still enabled and publicly accessible. These are development tools designed to help you debug during development. They are never meant to be on in production.\n\nWhat an attacker can do with a debug console: see every database query your application runs including the raw SQL, view all environment variables including your database password and API keys and secret tokens, inspect the full application stack trace revealing your file structure and framework version and dependencies, and in some cases execute arbitrary code on your server.\n\nThis is not a theoretical risk. Debug consoles have been the entry point for some of the most damaging breaches in recent years.\n\nThe fix:\n\nFor Laravel set APP_DEBUG=false in your .env file before deploying to production. For Django set DEBUG = False in your settings.py. For Node.js make sure you are not running development servers in production.\n\nFinding 4: Session Cookies Missing Security Flags\n\nSeverity: High\n\nAcross almost every project that set cookies, session cookies were missing one or more critical security flags.\n\nHttpOnly prevents JavaScript from reading the cookie. Without it any XSS attack can steal your users' session tokens and log in as them. Secure ensures the cookie is only sent over HTTPS. Without it the cookie travels in plain text over HTTP connections. SameSite protects against CSRF attacks where malicious sites trigger actions on your behalf.\n\nA session cookie missing all three is a fully exposed credential that any basic attacker can steal.\n\nThe fix:\n\nSet-Cookie: session=abc123; HttpOnly; Secure; SameSite=Strict\n\nIn Express.js:\n\njavascript\n\napp.use(session({\n\ncookie: {\n\nhttpOnly: true,\n\nsecure: true,\n\nsameSite: 'strict'\n\n}\n\n}));\n\nFinding 5: No Rate Limiting Anywhere\n\nSeverity: Medium to High\n\nI sent 15 rapid sequential requests to the homepages and API endpoints of every project I scanned. The majority returned HTTP 200 every single time with no throttling, no 429 response, and no rate limit headers.\n\nWhat this enables: credential stuffing using leaked password databases, API abuse scraping your data or causing downtime, and brute force guessing OTPs or PINs or passwords at machine speed.\n\nTwo of the developers I interviewed had already experienced attacks. One lost real money to a race condition exploit. Another's fintech application went offline for three days. In both cases the absence of rate limiting made the attack significantly easier.\n\nThe fix for Express.js:\n\njavascript\n\nconst rateLimit = require('express-rate-limit');\n\nconst limiter = rateLimit({\n\nwindowMs: 15 * 60 * 1000,\n\nmax: 100\n\n});\n\napp.use(limiter);\n\nThe Pattern I Kept Seeing\n\nEvery single developer I spoke to cared about security. Not one of them said it wasn't important.\n\nBut caring about security and having the tools to act on that care are two completely different things.\n\nThe developers who had the worst security posture weren't careless or negligent. They were busy. They were shipping. They were building the thing their users needed and security was always the next thing to fix.\n\nThe tools that exist to help them were built for security teams, not developers. The output is unreadable without a security background. The setup is complex. The pricing is inaccessible.\n\nSo developers don't use them. And they ship with the vulnerabilities intact.\n\nWhat I Built\n\nThat's why I built DeadZone.\n\nPaste your URL. We scan it. We tell you exactly what's broken, what an attacker can do with it, and how to fix it in plain English with code you can actually implement.\n\nNo security degree required. No $500 per month subscription. No 40 page PDF report.\n\nTry it free at deadzone-scanner.vercel.app, no sign up, no credit card, 30 seconds.\n\nIf you build anything online, scan it today. You might be surprised what you find.\n\nAbdulWahab Lawal is a developer and founder building DeadZone from Lagos, Nigeria. He is pursuing a Masters in AI and writes about building in public, developer security, and the Nigerian tech ecosystem.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-scanned-20-nigerian-developer-projects-for-security-vulnerabilities-here-s-i", "canonical_source": "https://dev.to/abdulwahab_lawal_e61e20a1/i-scanned-20-nigerian-developer-projects-for-security-vulnerabilities-heres-what-i-found-5dan", "published_at": "2026-09-04 02:47:12+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-09-04 03:23:31.640981+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-products", "ai-tools", "developer-tools"], "entities": ["DeadZone", "Firebase", "Vercel", "WordPress", "Laravel", "Django", "Node.js"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-scanned-20-nigerian-developer-projects-for-security-vulnerabilities-here-s-i", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-scanned-20-nigerian-developer-projects-for-security-vulnerabilities-here-s-i.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-scanned-20-nigerian-developer-projects-for-security-vulnerabilities-here-s-i.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-scanned-20-nigerian-developer-projects-for-security-vulnerabilities-here-s-i.jsonld"}}