What is CSRF Protection?
CSRF (Cross-Site Request Forgery) is an attack where a malicious website silently makes your browser perform actions on another site where you are logged in — changing your password, transferring funds, deleting data — riding on your active session without your knowledge. CSRF protection defeats this by requiring every sensitive form submission to carry a secret token that only pages genuinely served by the real site possess.
For business owners evaluating software, CSRF protection is a baseline hygiene marker: any admin panel handling payments, customer data or user management should implement it, and frameworks like Laravel include it by default. The visible symptom of it working is the occasional "session expired, please resubmit" message on a stale form — mildly annoying, but proof that forged cross-site requests would be rejected.