Elmira Loffredo, Carlos Nissan, Paula Rodríguez Juárez y Sebastian Rojas.
Wednesday 12 of March in the Universidad Europea de Madrid, the Digital Week was celebrated. With the special visit of the engineering informant, CEO and founder of hackr0cks Enrique Serrano Aparicio, in the auditorium of the B tower. With the presence of students of Business, Law, Business Administration among other degrees and guests to see the interview that Monica Villas did with the CEO of the company.
At 21 years old, Enrique began asking himself where he wanted to do his internship. From then on he started a journey of research of the best tech companies. Given his interest in programming, decided IBM was his best option because of the intelligence of their machines. He then went to the United States of America, where he was able to operate heavy machinery, create new products and practically talk to everyone in the world. However, he wanted to look for new paths in his career, so after being in IBM he went back to Spain, which felt like a major step back. That’s when realised he wanted to create something that he felt the world needed.
According to Enrique “It’s very important to be able to confront and answer to a cyberattack. Every company has to have training for this.”, which is why it is important to have a hacker to protect your company. That became his goal, he raised capital, looked for people from different areas who were willing to contribute, and built a platform to train hackers, he called it hackr0cks. To this day, his platform has worked with worldwide companies and organizations, such as the European Union.
Being a CEO has a lot of benefits, to Enrique the best part is being your own boss, and therefore being able to grow at your own pace without anyone to stop you. He also mentioned that the key to succeed as an entrepreneur of a company related to technology nowadays is to know your product, understand AI and programming, to take a minute, think about it, and then do it. You need to dedicate time to inform yourself about AI and programming but at the same time keep an eye on who the audience is that you will offer your product to and how you will sell it to them.
Enrique Serrano Aparicio and Mónica Villa at the UEM. Image: Elmira Loffredo
One of the biggest challenges in cybersecurity is artificial intelligence. If we have access to AI the bad guys have it too. So if you’re attacked with AI, you use it to counterattack. Another problem that comes with the advances of cybersecurity are the moral and ethical problems that come with it, say you’re able to predict an attack or a breach, how do you counterattack if it hasn’t happened?
It’s terrifying to think about the lengths of where cyberattacks and hackers can get to, as the cybersecurity expert Enrique tells us “there is no 100% cyber protection”. The students present in the auditorium presented their concerns about that dilema to which the CEO responded with recommendations like two factor authentication, more secure passwords and making access to your accounts complicated. Serrano also gave the students indicators on how to detect if your device has been hacked, for example, sensing the temperature of your device so that you can tell if it has been operating without you using it.