Interview with ICS Founder “Alejandro Rivera”-Great Motivation for Cyber Security Professionals

We are greatly thankful to ICS (Instituto de Ciberseguridad) founder “Alejandro Rivera” to lighten us with his vast knowledge and efforts he is doing in the field of Cyber Security.

As the development in the tech industry is exponentially growing, so many of you are looking for a motivation that would help you to seek your career as a cyber-security professional.  What is ICS and what are the requirements to become a professional cyber-security expert? We got all the answers from Alejandro Rivera, which are mentioned below.

1. Introduction at ICS?

The cybersecurity institute is a project made in Mexico with which we seek to promote 3 main things, first the development of security technologies, second specialized technology training in security and third with the inclusion of the labor market in Mexico and Latin America.

2. When and how did you start your career in the cybersecurity industry?

I am from the city of MoYour Interrey in Mexico, and I started about 5 years ago. I started like many other people, providing basic technical support service, installing software downloaded from the internet, cleaning computer equipment, that and adding a bit of curiosity about how things work, it was what formed me and helped me to be what today I am.

That curiosity led me to identify why PCs work in non-normal ways, but I was really interested in preventing that from happening, a very particular case was when a person came to me because her computer began to open many windows every time she turned it on, I started to investigate a bit, and that’s when I got to know the viruses or Malware, how they behave, how we got infected and the ways to eliminate them, that’s how it all started, later I started to investigate about some other threats and it was when I got CEH certification from the EC-Council, then I got to know Comptya, and I studied the content while I was starting to provide very basic security services, those services consisted in installing antivirus and checking the operation of the computers every week, if I found something I solved it, and this is like a little summary is how I came to be and know what I am today.

3. What are some people who have influenced you in the cybersecurity world?

My real career has been carried out in two stages, one driven by curiosity and the second by the professional, in the first stage I have a couple of people, Kevin Mitnik, a Spanish hacker named Chema Alonzo and Steve Wosniak, were my inspirations to continue researching in computer science and piracy, in my second stage I have a great physical security auditor named Jonny Long, Steve Jobs an excellent leader in computer science, dreamer and visionary, I like it because he searched, fought and followed his idea until reaching almost perfection In what I wanted, I also admire a person named Jack Ma for all the difficulties they had to go through in their lives to build what we now call alibaba.

4. What was the core idea/reason for establishing this community/ institute?

The main idea of the institute is to begin to educate society and promote development, innovation and technological inclusion beginning in Monterrey Mexico, then expand to various places in Mexico and finally join or collaborate with some Latin American countries in order to be able or try to include that technology in the portfolios of important security companies through the commercialization of that technology, that is our vision.

5. There are many websites in the market currently offering similar courses, what makes ICS different from them?

We not only seek to be a website that provides pre-recorded courses so that people can access the site and view the courses, that is done by anyone, I have seen and I have collaborated with many platforms that are a few months until the same It closes, and that’s because they only seek to be a platform to do courses and earn money. Our final goal, as I commented in the previous point, we seek to generate technological innovation in Mexico and Latin America, to achieve the aforementioned we have 3 objectives, Educate, Innovate and include.

On the part of education we have two ways to do it, one in person with spaces called security hub, these are networking spaces whose purpose is to meet people who currently study or work in areas related to computer science or cybersecurity and share our knowledge from a work point of view. All the content that we do in the institute is taken from the working world to our project, what we share are things that happen to us at work or we do every day with clients or employers, this not only allows us to show content extracted from a book, It allows us to show our real experience.

In our second part, to innovate, the intention of this is to encourage technological development in Mexico and Latin America with the intention of being able to stand out or try to compete against the technologies that are currently sold in the market and that are predominant in countries such as, Germany, Israel, the United States, and some Asian countries, an example in Mexico there are staff that are dedicated to developing technologies, but since there is not enough support they do not dare to innovate, in the Cybersecurity Institute we are currently looking to train people, get the economic and technological resources to make those projects stand out and be commercialized by the developers themselves.

In the section on Including is very simple, if the person can not or is not interested in the development of technology we seek to generate alliances with companies with the intention of being able to get our associates to perform professional practices or a job based on the skills and knowledge that students have acquired on the platform, through live courses and the various learning modalities we have for them.

6. How is your institute willing to change the education process?

Apart from wanting to develop technology or seek to convert Mexico and Latin America into technologically competitive countries with the help of private companies and government, we have a very big task, which is to educate users and companies regarding the security of their information, and problems that can occur if they are not prepared or prepared in case their information is compromised.

7. How is ICS contributing to improve the online security of individuals and surrounding communities?

We seek to improve security Online with talks, prevention tips focused on cybersecurity issues whose target audience are companies and civilians, providing topics such as: Information leaks and legal problems faced by organizations or privacy in social networks.

8. What challenges/ barriers do you face in your mission?

Our challenges are multiple:

1.- One of our challenges is economic, rent servers, talks, preparation of content, all generate costs that sometimes we can not pay and we have to resort to the painful situation of having to request support to our users to be able to get ahead of situations a little specific.

2.- Another problem is the lack of culture in security and clear objectives, unfortunately people have a wrong idea about what security is, it is very common for some of our users to criticize us because for them we do not teach true security, the problem is that they have misconceptions about what security is, this is because they seek us to teach them the typical Hacking through the use of tools, our work is focused on teaching real computer security, we show the methodologies which are used in a work environment.

The current platforms are focused on providing outdated content, and today’s young people while telling them they can hack a Facebook account are happy.

 9. Why cyber security is becoming