Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

In this episode of This Week in NET, host João Tomé is joined by Chema Alonso, Vice President and Head of International Development at Cloudflare. Chema shares how a 1998 paper on SQL injection launched his career in hacking, his path from running a startup in Madrid to becoming a Microsoft MVP for 14 years, and how he ended up leading cybersecurity at Telefónica for more than a decade — after telling them “you don’t have enough money to make me work for you.” He also explains why he left Telefónica in 2025 to join Cloudflare, and what surprised him about the company’s technical depth.

The word hacker did not start as an insult, it described people pushing technology beyond what it was designed to do. The clip reframes hacking as curiosity, experimentation and technical creativity, while showing how the meaning only became darker when malicious intent entered the picture.