Cybersecurity Essentials for IT Teams: Defend the Systems You Already Run
“Security skills that work on the systems you already run.”
Build threat modeling, vulnerability triage, and incident detection skills directly inside the infrastructure and codebases you manage today
One-time · Lifetime access · Certificate included
- ✓6 modules of content
- ✓36 concept slides
- ✓18 practical exercises
- ✓24 quiz questions
- ✓Capstone project
- ✓LearnAspire certificate
Learning Outcomes
What you'll learn
The day after you finish
The day after completing this course, you will be able to pick up a real system, codebase, or infrastructure change you own at work, run a structured assessment against it using production-grade open-source tooling, produce a threat model and prioritized finding report, and present that output to your team or to an auditor as a credible, defensible security analysis.
Who this is for
- IT generalists with 2-5 years of infrastructure experience who have been handed security responsibilities — vulnerability scans, patch triage, audit prep — without formal security training
- Full-stack developers or backend engineers who own application code in production and need to identify and remediate OWASP Top 10 risks in their own codebases
- DevOps or cloud engineers managing AWS, Azure, or GCP environments who are responsible for secure configuration but have no structured framework for evaluating what 'secure' actually means in their stack
Prerequisites
- Comfortable reading and writing shell commands — you run Bash or PowerShell as part of your regular workflow, not just when following a tutorial
- Hands-on experience managing or deploying at least one of: Linux servers, cloud infrastructure (AWS/Azure/GCP), containerized workloads, or a web application in production
- Familiarity with at least one application stack — you know what a request/response cycle looks like, what environment variables are for, and what a database connection string contains
Curriculum
6 modules · full breakdown
☁️ Part of: Cloud & DevOps Path
Capstone Project
Full-Spectrum Security Assessment: From Threat Model to Remediation Report
Learners perform an end-to-end security assessment of a realistic target environment provided as a pre-configured lab — a deliberately misconfigured Linux web server running a Node.js API with an attached PostgreSQL database, exposed via a simulated cloud perimeter with an intentionally permissive security group. The assessment spans the full workflow built across the course: write a STRIDE threat model for the system, run Nmap and OpenVAS scans and score every finding with CVSS v3.1, use OWASP ZAP and manual review to identify application-layer vulnerabilities in the API, review the Wazuh alert log generated during the assessment to identify which of your own scan actions triggered detections, and produce a consolidated remediation report that maps every finding to a NIST CSF 2.0 function and ranks items by exploitability and business impact. The final report must include at least one control recommendation that explicitly names the operational trade-off of implementing it.
What you'll deliver
A structured security assessment package containing: (1) a one-page STRIDE threat model with identified attack paths and trust boundaries, (2) a vulnerability scan report with CVSS-scored findings and a prioritized remediation backlog in table format, (3) annotated OWASP ZAP output identifying at minimum three confirmed application-layer vulnerabilities with specific endpoint references, (4) a Wazuh alert excerpt with a written triage decision for each alert, and (5) an executive summary of no more than 300 words mapping the top three risks to NIST CSF 2.0 Identify, Protect, and Detect functions