Alejandro Corletti - From the Military to the Private Sector, by way of Academia

How to get started in cybersecurity is the question I get most, and to answer it I sit down with Alejandro Corletti, of Darfe.es. His story is already half a lesson in itself: captain in the Argentine army, head of networks, a doctorate in Madrid, and settled in Spain since the year 2000 with his own company.

Alejandro is a firm believer in free software. His books add up to more than a million downloads in free electronic format, and he’s just put together a course, Learning Cybersecurity Step by Step, with an obsession for going level by level without skipping the foundations. We agree on something I repeat a lot: without a base there’s no specialisation, and the big shiny button is no substitute for understanding what you’re doing. He’s clear about it with traffic analysis, which he defends as his turf, because everything that happens to you ends up passing through a cable, a fibre or the air.

From there we jump to the big picture. Alejandro maintains that today’s cyber mafias are more powerful than most States, that what’s critical is no longer just infrastructure but information, and that a third military domain is emerging, the cognitive one, the domain of opinion, run not by a general in a beret but by whoever can reach hundreds of millions of people. Plenty to think about.