📖 CYBERSECURITY BOOKS 🟢 RIDERS on the STORM

I usually ask my guests which book they recommend, and almost every time they hand me a technical manual. Today I break with that habit and kick off a series about reads that orbit cybersecurity without being written from the trenches. I start with Jinetes en la tormenta (and for the record, I read the whole thing), by J. M. Ferri, Juan Miguel, who admits to suffering all his life from people calling him José Manuel or Juan Manuel.

Ferri doesn’t come from the scene. He arrives from the business world, international trade and marketing, and he wanted to write a hard boiled crime novel in the 1930s style, except today’s underworld lives on the dark web. What came out was a techno thriller (that’s how Amazon’s algorithm tagged it), set in a very present-day Madrid that’s almost a character in its own right. To research it he drew on the National Police, the CNI and the Department of National Security, soaked up Chema Alonso’s talks and, half by chance, ended up publishing it with the 0xWord imprint. He wrote it during the pandemic, five or six hours a day.

We talk about writing past the age of forty, about the vertigo of social media for a first-time author, and about the reason behind the title, which comes from a song by The Doors that his daughter asks him for as the rainy one. He’s already working on the sequel.