How to work in the Civil Guard in cybersecurity? What is the National Cyber League?

On this channel we’ve covered almost every profession in cybersecurity, but there’s one we can’t do from the private sector: catching the bad guys. That’s what the security forces are for. After Carlos Loureiro and the National Police, I sit down with Luis Fernando, a Guardia Civil officer with thirty-seven years in uniform, thirty of them glued to technology, and the man who got the Guardia Civil onto the internet back in the nineties.

Luis Fernando explains the two routes in, through the guards’ academy or through the General Military Academy of Zaragoza, and how officers today graduate with a degree in industrial engineering. He also debunks the myth about the pay: after thirty-seven years, he says, his entire net worth is a mortgage. You don’t come here for the money. We spend a good part of the conversation on the NCL, the National Cyberspace Challenges League, which was born in 2019 with seventy volunteer mentors and teams that mix technology, law and communication.

He shares anecdotes like the night of the Y2K bug, confined to barracks waiting for an apocalypse that never came, and he sticks his neck out with an honest forecast: on cybercrime he’s pessimistic, because the curve keeps climbing and investigations run into countries that won’t cooperate. A realist with experience, as he describes himself.