Node.js Production Security: Key Practices That Stop Real Attacks

A developer with seven years of production experience has published a Node.js security checklist following a costly penetration test that uncovered eleven vulnerabilities in an e-commerce backend. The pentest, conducted on a system handling 40,000 daily requests, revealed issues including an open CORS policy, SQL injection, and session tokens exposed in log files. The checklist prioritizes keeping secrets out of codebases entirely, storing them only in environment variables that are excluded from version control. It also emphasizes regular dependency auditing using npm audit, committing lockfiles, and pinning exact package versions to prevent silent upgrades. Additional recommendations include using the helmet middleware to apply secure HTTP headers with minimal effort.