Establish developer security training and awareness program
Implementation Effort: Medium – Building training content across secure coding, supply chain, and pipeline threats and rolling it out to engineering teams requires curriculum ownership and coordination. User Impact: Medium – Developers across the engineering organization must complete the training, so a broad subset of users is directly affected. Lifecycle Stage: Govern
Overview
Security tools can detect vulnerabilities, but they cannot prevent developers from introducing them. When developers lack training in secure coding, supply chain risks, and pipeline security, they repeat the same mistakes.
Common patterns include hardcoding credentials, pulling unvetted dependencies, granting excessive permissions, and writing permissive network rules. Each creates attack opportunities. Organizations that rely solely on tooling without investing in developer education end up in a reactive cycle of scan, find, fix, and repeat that never reduces the inflow of new findings.
A developer security training program establishes a shared baseline of knowledge across the engineering organization. The program should cover secure coding fundamentals, common vulnerability classes such as injection and broken access control, supply chain risks including dependency confusion and typosquatting, CI/CD pipeline threats from the OWASP CI/CD Top 10, and the organization's own security tooling and policies.
Microsoft's Security Development Lifecycle provides a well-established curriculum model, and Microsoft Learn offers self-paced training paths on threat modeling, secure development, and DevSecOps practices. Training is most effective when it is role-specific, refreshed regularly, and reinforced by practical exercises such as capture-the-flag events or code review of real findings from the organization's own repositories.
This supports Assume breach by ensuring that developers understand how threat actors exploit development environments, making them active participants in the organization's defense rather than passive consumers of scan results.