GoKawiilMikko Hyppönen is pacing back and forth on the stage, with his trademark dark blonde ponytail resting on an impeccable teal suit. A seasoned speaker, he is trying to make an important point to a room full of fellow hackers and security researchers at one of the industry’s global annual meet-ups.
“I often call this ‘cybersecurity Tetris’,” he tells the audience with a serious face, reeling off the rules of the classic video game. When you complete a whole line of bricks, the row vanishes, leaving the rest of the bricks to fall into a new line.
“So your successes disappear, while your failures pile up,” he tells the audience during his keynote at Black Hat in Las Vegas in 2025. “The challenge we face as cybersecurity people is that our work is invisible… when you do your job perfectly, the end result is that nothing happens.”
Hyppönen’s work, however, has certainly not been invisible. As one of the industry’s longest serving cybersecurity figures, he has spent more than 35 years fighting malware. When he started in the late 1980s, the term “malware” was still far from everyday parlance; the terms instead were computer “virus” or “trojans.” The internet was still something few people had access to, and some viruses relied on infecting computers with floppy disks.
Since then, Hyppönen estimated he has analyzed thousands of different kinds of malware. And thanks to his frequent talks at conferences all over the world, he has become one of the most recognizable faces and respected voices of the cybersecurity community.
While Hyppönen has spent much of his life trying to keep malware from getting into places it is not supposed to, now he is still doing much of the same, albeit a slightly different tack: His new challenge is to protect people against drones.
Hyppönen, who is Finnish, told me during a recent interview that he lives about two hours away from Finland’s border with Russia. An increasingly hostile Russia and its 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, where the majority of deaths have reportedly come from unmanned aerial attacks, have made Hyppönen believe he can have renewed impact by fighting drones.
For Hyppönen, it is also a matter of recognizing that while there are still long-standing problems to solve in the world of cybersecurity — malware is not going anywhere and there are plenty of new problems on the horizon — the industry has made huge strides over the last two decades. An iPhone, Hyppönen brought up as an example, is an extremely secure device. The cybersecurity aspects of drone warfare, on the other hand, remain almost uncharted territory.
Image Credits:courtesy of Mikko Hypponen
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