Hispasec: 25 years of the company that made Google’s arrival in Malaga possible

Malaga’s rise in football Digital security is the fruit of years of work by companies like Hispasec and has evolved into one of the best today. market leading companiesWith a turnover exceeding three million Euros, a staff of more than 60 professionals and operations in fifty countries.

One of the founders of Hispasec was Bernardo Quintero, the architect of the American giant’s commitment to Malaga. The computer engineer (Vélez-Málaga, 1973) left the company after the founding of VirusTotal, and the company was acquired by Google in 2012 and is headquartered in the Andalusian city.

Quintero is currently the head of Google’s new Security Engineering Center, the third of its kind in Europe. It opened its doors in Malaga Port last November.

A leading company

Fernando Ramírez, chief executive of Hispasec, This company, he claims, was “the seed for all of this to happen.”

Actually it all started with him Professor Manuel Enciso, Director of the School of Informatics at the University of Malaga: “Hispasec was the dean of cybersecurity in Spain. VirusTotal was born from there, which makes the arrival of Google possible. They are clear visionaries.”

In a recent interview with EFE, Ramírez described Quintero as “extremely intelligent, quite visionary He is someone who enjoys working together in his work, who is distant in his behavior but close to his employees.

Quintero, who created his first antivirus software when he was just 14 years old, launched VirusTotal within Hispasec in 2004, and a few years later he set out on his own at the head of this company and aroused Google’s appetite for investment in 2012.

Not only has VirusTotal never left Malaga, but it was also key to Google establishing its new cybersecurity headquarters there.

Entrepreneur and visionary

Bernardo Quintero wrote on the social network Twitter some time ago that it is now called 2 air conditioners and some shelves. I found a place to place it, connected the network cable, and configured the IP: Hispasec was born.”

He and his partners were “real novices in the business world,” he recalls, and their journey was not smooth. The first of these is, “The first one on the forehead. When we went to register the company, there was a dry cleaning-laundry called Hispasec. We gave their labeling system: Hispasec Systemas SL.” explains in the title.

In it, he describes how he started publishing the cybersecurity newsletter ‘Una a día’, “a kind of blog where the concept didn’t even exist”. “Visionary?” asked Quintero. Of course yes, like in 2009 when he told the VirusTotal team that they were starting to work on being acquired by Google.

About two years later, after the operation closed, his colleagues working as “googlers” gave him a T-shirt for lunch that read: CTO (Chief Trolling Officer), or the same, troll director.

“Moral: I never troll, I always mean it,” says Quintero, who admits that his decade-plus at Google has “come a long way” and that, in his case, it has been “a real roller coaster.” “At some point we will have to continue the topic… or write a book… :),” he notes.

Bet on Malaga

Quintero now runs Google’s brand new Security Engineering Center (GSEC) in Malaga. Facilities that strengthen the city’s position as the technology capital and this has had a calling effect on the arrival of other international companies such as Vodafone, which has an innovation center in Europe; French Capgemini; Japanese NTT Data or British Quantexa.

Known as the center of Malaga The flagship of the multinational company in the field of cyber security in Europe, It joins GSECs in Munich, Germany, specializing in privacy and security, and Dublin, Ireland, focusing on content stewardship, which opened in 2019 and 2021 respectively.

More than sixty people currently work in these facilities, which have a capacity of one hundred people. It is full He greeted Malaga In Quintero, such as the auditorium called ‘Moraga’, known in the city for summer beach parties, or the ‘Espeto’ room, which is roasted fish, usually sardines, stuck on poles, which is very specific to the region.

As Google’s Head of Global Affairs Kent Walker said during the opening of the center, those working in these areas with sea views have a big responsibility to “make the Internet a better and safer place.”