See you online friend. Goodbye Angelucho

Good morning everyone.

As most of you already know, a few days ago Ángel Pablo Avilés, better known on social networks as Angelucho, left us . Angelucho has been like an older brother to me, a counselor, a friend and constant support. Rarely was the week that he didn't have the "ping" from him, and if he didn't have it, something happened and it was my turn to do it. The hole that Ángel has left us is indescribable, but so is his legacy.

I have preferred to give myself a few days to go through my personal grief, think about it surrounded by my loved ones, and be able to evaluate and be proud of having been able to enjoy it even if it was only ten years. I had the bad luck of meeting him late, but the immense luck of being able to say that he was one of my best friends.

Ángel and I met in March 2012 at the 3rd edition of RootedCON. We were introduced by Javi, Ángel's former colleague, and with whom he had been talking about malware for some time due to a project we had in hand at that time. After RootedCON I sent him a message on LinkedIn to have a coffee and tell him more about the Flu Project and our collaboration with some police officers, and that coffee became the first of many more. As a joke, I remember that Ángel always drank his coffee alone, and after several days of seeing each other and when trust began to grow, I asked him why. Ángel could not tolerate milk but not because of any intolerance; Among his many lives he was in the Balkan war, and due to circumstances of what he experienced there he required a blood transfusion. He told me that due to the lack of resources in the field hospital, they cleaned the tracks with milk, and he had such a bad time that he never tolerated a single drop of milk again, so we have always been very careful with it.

Throughout 2012 I stopped by the GDT several times to give them some support, we met up many times to chat and one day Ángel proposed that I give a talk together in which we would unite both worlds, the world of awareness that he promoted with his famous "Angelucho Blog", and the more technical one that we promoted from the "Flu Project". As a joke, Ángel called that first collaboration "Angelflucho", and he even made a logo that he sent me every so often. The talk we prepared was finally called "X-ray of a cyberpredator", and surely most of you have already seen it in one of its many variants. We were looking for an upcoming conference in which to do this collaboration, and finally we decided to do it in a conference that was held on February 1 and 2, 2013 in Elche and in which we were going to coincide. He played the role of "cop", telling how cyber predators cajoled minors with deception, and I was telling, on the one hand, how the aggressors used some techniques to hide and, on the other hand, what routes could be followed at a technological level to hunt them down. The mix was a success and that talk brought us together a lot.

The chronicle of these days you can see it on Ángel's blog, including some anecdotes like that of the taxi driver and the hacker... Yes, Angelucho hesitated everyone, and the taxi driver who took us from the station to the congress was not spared, and he did it with astonishing naturalness, but not to offend, but quite the opposite, with great affection and to teach positive things. Our taxi driver learned what it meant to be a hacker, and we enjoyed a very enjoyable trip with Juan.

That conference was also very important for Ángel and me because we met Josep Albors, "our Giuseppe." From that same day, Ángel always told us that we were his left and right lungs. The anecdote of how we met was very funny to all of us, except probably poor Josep, who had a pretty bad time. Due to an organizational problem, Ángel, his wife Virtu and I were going to miss our train, and one of the speakers who turned out to be Josep, better than bread, offered to take us even knowing that we would arrive at the station on time. It was almost impossible. And, literally, he left us at the Alicante station with 3 minutes left before they closed the doors, and after a marathon we managed to get them to take pity on us and open the doors for us with 1 minute left. Josep discovered that his old Megane had a sixth gear on that trip...I won't say anything else.

The hangover from that congress and the good feelings after it made Ángel send Josep and other colleagues to us of the sector and to me an email with one of his now famous "what if...". It was the anniversary of his blog and he had packaged many of his articles formatting a book that had titled "X1Red+Segura", and in that email we proposed having a Coca Cola and crochet hangout to celebrate it and at the same time have talks from "some hackers" to convey the benefits and dangers of the Internet to some guests, in reference to some of the stories he told in the book. I took his email quite seriously, I called him and said, how big do you want this hookup party to be? And if...? There are no eggs... A day later we had reserved the auditorium of what was my current company at that time, everis, a website built and a first registration system. This is how X1RedMasSegura was born.

I remember that first edition of X1RedMasSegura with great affection, many people collaborated. Since Ángel sent that email, we only had 2 months to set it up because he wanted Internet Day to be celebrated (May 17), on April 5 we already had the full agenda and we had the support of the IPA association (a very big hug strong), from the association of those affected by the ST (another very strong hug), from the ANTPJI, from Leda Wiesse, who altruistically designed the great X1RedMasSegura logo for us (thank you for that jewel you gave us), from Radio3W (the Twitch of the time), half of our families... and many other people who became a soul and part of the organization at that same congress, Blanca, a former everis colleague, Olga, who had an educational radio program digital on Radio3W, Longinos, one of the cyber-grandfathers who attended the first of our workshops, Iván, tutor agent of Tres Cantos, Fernando, Josep's former colleague at eset, our respective wives, Virtu and Patricia, David Insonusvita, his son and who provided the soundtrack to each event, etc. etc.. Over the years, in the organization we have had many other supports and incorporations, Victor Villagrá (who since 2014 got us the UPM auditorium), Jose Manuel Vera, Pablo F. Burgueño, Román Ramírez and Arantxa Sanz of RootedCON (where we also celebrate a special edition of Grateful for the work done, she brought us food and coffee to make the events more bearable, companies that supported us with material and merchandise, and endless collaborations of great significance, such as those of Incibe or the CCN, or those great speakers that we never met. have failed, Lorenzo Martínez, Pablo González, Chema Alonso... Over the years X1RedMasSegura has also done many workshops for cyber grandparents, people with special abilities, minors, in short, workshops aimed at those who really needed that knowledge, and Ángel was the soul of it all, he dedicated even his vacations to traveling around Spain in this tireless work, something truly commendable.