Let's imagine that we are in a hotel and the room card does not open. We go down to the reception and they can't cope there. About twenty guests complain angrily about the same thing. The staff, overwhelmed and overwhelmed by the chaos, explain to us that their system has been hacked and that a hotel employee will accompany us, one by one, to open room by room. Or suppose that suddenly all the traffic lights in the city stop working due to a cyber attack on the municipal traffic system. Or we find that when we go to pay with a card in the supermarket we cannot do so because our bank's website has been attacked.
The three examples – explains Ester Tejedor, director of Cybersecurity Technology and Operations at Telefónica Tech – are real cases of ransomware incidents managed in recent years from her department. “To put it simply, a ransom is an attack that paralyzes your company. It is one of the most harmful and directly affects the average citizen in their daily lives,” she explains.
As a child, she was attracted to investigating to see how things worked. She “was curious about mathematics, physics, science… but she was not clear about what she wanted to study. One day a girl in her first year of teleco gave us an inspirational talk at school and told us about launching satellites. I thought, ‘I want to do that!’” she remembers.
Without having finished his university studies, he was already working at Telefónica. “I started with data networks. In those days the Internet was still in its infancy, almost the only thing we had was the telephone and our concern was that we all had international calls enabled because we worked with teams in Peru, Chile or Colombia," he recalls with memories from the day before yesterday that already sound like archeology to us. technological. Times when underwater cables had to be pulled “and we faced all kinds of problems such as hurricanes or a shark biting the cables.”
In these twenty years the Internet has matured. Data management reaches colossal dimensions, we have learned to store information in the cloud... and the bites of sharks are nothing compared to the havoc caused by cybercriminals. For eight years, the girl who wanted to launch satellites has led teams that offer consulting and high-value services in cybersecurity.
Cinema usually portrays cybercriminals as lone wolves, capable of messing around from their student room with a keyboard and a flash drive while they wait for a courier to bring them a cheap pizza from the Italian on the corner. Real life is much more complicated. “We are facing complex and highly industrialized criminal organizations. Many ransomware actors also rely on a ransomware as a Service model. By paying a subscription, they make the samples and tools available to other cybercriminals to execute the ransom and publish the stolen information. The ransom collection is normally in cryptocurrencies, such as bitcoins, to avoid tracking,” Tejedor explains with the thoroughness of a Tom Clancy story.
As if that were not enough, these evil brainiacs are constantly designing new malicious programs, malware. Cybersecurity experts have no choice but to be updated 365 days a year. “A technology born two or three years ago can already be cutting-edge and with enormous expansion. Our challenge is to achieve ultra-fast learning capacity to neutralize their attacks. We always say that it is impossible to prevent 100% of attacks. This statement does not reflect a lack of competence, but rather that, in the world of cybersecurity, we can never guarantee 100% security. Cybercriminals also have highly specialized and constantly evolving teams,” he points out.
The mechanics of a cyberattack, and its replication in cybersecurity, are quite similar to the dynamics of a video game when you go through screens. “It is essential to have various layers of protection in your systems. As an attacker crosses barriers, it will become increasingly difficult for him. You know that it is not possible to prevent all attacks, but you will have a tiered defense,” he points out. Defensive security teams are responsible for creating these layers. When the attack is already a reality, reactive security experts, incident response teams, come into play.
Just as we have seen thousands of times in the movies, they travel to the headquarters of the attacked company with briefcases full of cables and other cutting-edge devices to fight the criminals face to face. “Its performance consists of several stages. After the investigation and analysis, the first stage would be containment, to prevent the damage from spreading and the threat affecting more departments, more headquarters... Then we enter the eradication phase, in which the malicious software must be eliminated ( malware) and ensure that it is not reactivated in the future.” Finally, after the recovery, and before returning control to the client, they make sure that everything is clean, that there is no trace of the attackers within the system.
This human deployment calls for the best experts in multidisciplinary fields: engineers, computer scientists, lawyers, communication experts... A huge team that at Telefónica Tech reaches 6,200 professionals of more than 60 nationalities and with more than 4,000 technology certifications, of which 5,500 professionals correspond to Cybersecurity and Cloud operations. “We work from two DOCs (Digital Operations Center), one in Madrid and the other in Bogotá (Colombia). “This way we can provide service to customers 24 hours a day, every day of the year,” he adds. “Those dimensions and that specialization are only possible in a large company like Telefónica Tech.”
Every day in the office he learns something new. No two days are the same, nor days of complete calm. Standing up to cybercrime means living in a constant frenzy, but Tejedor has his escape valves. “I do sports almost daily. It's my time to release adrenaline, to organize ideas. I practice surfing, archery, running - I have run the Madrid Half Marathon several times -, skating... I also like to paint watercolors and make crafts with cardboard, EVA foam and a hot melt gun. At home, I don't have to buy my daughters' costumes ready-made, I make them myself. At school they know me as the mother of costumes!
That creativity with a touch of daring becomes an asset in your department. “To work on this you have to look for imaginative solutions. I think this quality is a differential value that has helped me be where I am,” she reflects. “In fact, I don't think that women are limited because they are women. Many girls are moving away from scientific branches, I don't know if because it is necessary to have daring, which boys have more innately, or because it means taking a different path from that of their classmates."
She gave him courage and now leads the 'good guys' in their fight against the criminals of the digital universe. “To little Ester who didn't know very well what she wanted to do in life, she would tell her not to worry about not having a plan. The message would be 'don't be afraid and dare with what you want, you will end up achieving it.'
