Cross-site request forgery is #5 on the OWASP Top Ten. CSRF allows an attacker to perform actions on a website as if they are an authenticated user.

This warning is raised when no call to protect_from_forgery is found in ApplicationController. This method prevents CSRF.

For Rails 4 applications, it is recommended that you use protect_from_forgery :with => :exception. This code is inserted into newly generated applications. The default is to nil out the session object, which has been a source of many CSRF bypasses due to session memoization.

See the Ruby Security Guide for details.

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