Step into The Grid: a six-month cinematic journey where developers learn cybersecurity the hacker's way. Each month unlocks a new chapter, starting with core vulnerabilities, escalating into advanced attack vectors and culminating in a full-scale simulation.
This roadmap takes you from rookie intruder to skilled defender, combining real-world exploits, storytelling and hands-on labs. By the end, you'll not only recognize vulnerabilities, you'll know how to stop them.
Prove yourself by following the breadcrumbs. Learn the essentials: SQL injection, DoS and cryptography. Not through lectures, but via short, hands-on demos and guided micro-challenges. Each challenge is based on a real attack that actually happened, recreated in a controlled lab environment.
You can spot and explain core vulnerabilities with working demos.
Your first mission for Sine Nomine begins. You'll break into Solstice Bank to uncover how the wealthy launder their money. But the deeper you go, the clearer it becomes, Solstice is just the surface. All trails lead to Vaulture Capital, a much bigger target.
This is not just a single hack; it's the start of something larger. Through The Rabbit Hole, you'll gather intel on Vaulture Capital, map their systems and sharpen your skills. By the end of Month 2, you've covered the OWASP Top 10, profiled your victims and prepared yourself for the ultimate heist.
You can map an app, prioritize risks and brief a team.
Use everything you've learned so far to take on Vaulture Capital. In our live in-person session, you'll breach the systems of Vaulture Capital, a shadowy private bank with deep pockets and dirty secrets. Working as a team, you'll scan, exploit and exfiltrate funds in real-time.
But your mission doesn't end there. After Hack the Bank, you'll dive into the Bits n Bites app, a real-world mobile delivery platform hiding insecure APIs, broken authentication and exploitable XSS paths. You'll uncover how weak cryptographic design and blind SQL injection can lead to full account takeover. More importantly, you'll learn to think critically about unsafe patterns in modern mobile/web systems and how to turn your findings into action for defenders.
You can design and run an ethical exploit workflow.
No system is unbreachable, because no system is without people. In the previous months you've hacked code. Now it's time to hack humans. This month, you'll enter the world of social engineering, where exploits don't rely on bugs, but on behavior.
Through phishing, pretexting, whaling and more, you'll manipulate your way past technical defenses. You'll gather intel, choose your target and execute a full attack chain. From initial contact to exfiltration.
You can recognize, exploit and defend against social engineering attacks.
You've seen how systems break. Now, you'll learn how to build them so they don't. In Month 5, you switch seats. No longer the attacker, you become the defender. You'll revisit the same vulnerabilities you once exploited. SQL injection, XSS, authentication flaws and more, but now from the inside out.
You'll dive into secure coding patterns, input validation, access control and safe-by-default APIs. With each exercise, you'll harden a system that was once easy to break. The goal: make the attack paths you once used... disappear.
This month marks your transition from hacker to engineer. From offense to defense.
You can write secure, robust code that stops the attacks you once executed.
One last hack. One last chance to prove you've mastered The Grid. Everything you've learned comes together in one final mission. A high-stakes simulation that fuses all previous vulnerabilities. You'll infiltrate a new target, a complex institution built to resist you. To succeed, you'll need to think like an attacker and a defender. Analyze the system. Exploit its weaknesses. Patch its flaws. And above all: survive the breach with lessons you can carry into the real world.
This is your final test. Bring it down and graduate from The Grid.
You can defend real systems with offensive insight and engineering skill.