Teaching Developers to Think Offensively in 30 Days

Week 1: Awareness and Curiosity Launch with a kickoff workshop that demystifies common attacks. Show real demos of SQL injection, CSRF, and SSRF against internal apps. Assign reading that highlights how business logic flaws cost companies real money.

Week 2: Hands-On Exploitation Give developers a lab with intentionally vulnerable services. Let them weaponise Burp Suite, craft payloads, and experience the thrill of exploitation. Learning sticks when they feel the impact first-hand.

Week 3: Defensive Refactoring Shift the focus to remediation. Have teams patch the flaws they exploited, write regression tests, and integrate static analysis tools into their pipelines. Encourage pair programming with security engineers to share patterns.

Week 4: Capstone Challenge Host a mini red-versus-blue exercise where developers defend a service while peers attempt to break it. Debrief with lessons learned, documenting new secure coding guidelines.

Graduation Within 30 days, developers will start asking security questions proactively. Maintain the momentum with quarterly refreshers and a recognition program for secure design contributions.