Teaching Offensive Security: A Lifecycle-Sequenced Curriculum from Kali to MITRE ATT&CK

Volume 5 of 10 in the Engineering-to-Research Monograph Series. There is a persistent gap in cybersecurity education between knowing about attacks and being able to perform and counter them. This report presents and defends a curriculum design the author developed while designing and delivering an introductory cybersecurity engineering course: lead with the attacker's mindset; scaffold the danger in a controlled environment; sequence by the attacker lifecycle, anchored to the cyber kill chain and MITRE ATT&CK; teach exploitation down to assembly and memory; loop back into intrusion detection and digital forensics; and embed ethics and law throughout. The design is aligned to the NIST/NICE workforce framework and observable, Bloom's-taxonomy-style assessment, expressed as explicit learning outcomes. It contributes a lifecycle-sequenced curriculum, the 'one technique, three chairs' pedagogical device, two design principles, and a practitioner-educator vantage.The paper and figures are licensed CC BY 4.0. This work contains no confidential or proprietary employer information.