Introduction: security is no longer "the specialists' job"

If you build web applications, scenes like these are probably becoming familiar:

You wrote the login flow and the admin pages yourself. But security checks keep slipping, because "there's nobody here who really knows that stuff."

You let AI write more of your code now. Working software arrives faster, but you have no way to judge whether that code is safe.

You promote AI adoption or digitalization inside your company, and when someone asks "is the security OK?", you are not sure what "OK" would even be based on.

Few organizations have a dedicated security person. Yet when an incident happens, the people who respond are the ones who built the system or promoted it. For many engineers today, the first problem is not learning advanced attack techniques. It is having a way to verify that the defenses you put in actually work .

That verification step is where things get fuzzy.…