Web Application Security Fundamentals (Self-Paced)

This is an intermediate course built to span two audiences that are usually trained apart. There is enough technical grounding for the people who build and configure web applications, and enough plain-language framing for the system owners, security officers and program staff who oversee them without writing code. Shared vocabulary is the whole point of the design, because most web application security training targets developers only, whereas here a developer, a system owner and a security officer can take the same course and come away able to hold the same conversation. There is no lab, by design rather than by omission: nothing needs provisioning and there are no technical prerequisites, which is what makes it assignable to oversight staff and developers at once. Reinforcement comes instead from interactive categorization and sequencing exercises and from scenario prompts asking "given this situation, what is the most appropriate action," and no lab environment is needed for any module or for the final assessment.

Topics are anchored to a real policy and standards landscape rather than taught generically. The first module is intentionally policy-heavy so later technical modules can refer back to it, covering security risk management frameworks and the system-authorization process, a major executive cybersecurity order and its amendments, and the NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0, and it teaches a skill that is rare even in commercial training — recognizing when a policy has been superseded — and why confirming currency matters before leaning on it for compliance. The second module is organized around the OWASP Top 10, 2025 edition, and concentrates on recognizing risk rather than writing exploit code, after which the course moves through the secure development lifecycle and the Secure Software Development Framework, into identity, access control and data protection with Zero Trust and FIPS-validated encryption, and finishes on continuous monitoring, event logging and incident reporting. Each module carries ungraded quick checks, and a graded final assessment covers all five modules proportionally, weighted toward applying concepts rather than recalling facts, at 70% to pass with unlimited retakes.