Your marketing team just built a customer survey app in 30 minutes using a drag-and-drop platform. Two weeks later, your entire customer database is exposed on the dark web. Sound impossible? Unfortunately, this scenario plays out more often than you’d think in the world of low-code and no-code development.

I learned this the hard way when I was consulting for a mid-sized company that embraced citizen development. Their HR department had created what seemed like a simple employee feedback system using a popular no-code platform. Within days of launch, we discovered that anyone with the direct URL could access every employee’s personal information and salary details. The “secure” platform they trusted had default settings that were anything but secure.

Low-code and no-code platforms promise to democratize software development, allowing anyone to build applications without writing traditional code. While these platforms have genuinely revolutionized how we approach application development, they’ve also introduced a new category of security risks that many organizations aren’t prepared for.