Mikko Hyppönen is pacing backwards and forwards on the stage, along with his trademark darkish blonde ponytail resting on an impeccable teal go well with. A seasoned speaker, he’s making an attempt to make an necessary level to a room filled with fellow hackers and security researchers at one of many trade’s world annual meet-ups.
“I usually name this ‘cybersecurity Tetris’,” he tells the viewers with a critical face, reeling off the principles of the traditional online game. While you full a complete line of bricks, the row vanishes, leaving the remainder of the bricks to fall into a brand new line.
“So your successes disappear, whereas your failures pile up,” he tells the viewers throughout his keynote at Black Hat in Las Vegas in 2025. “The problem we face as cybersecurity individuals is that our work is invisible… while you do your job completely, the top result’s that nothing occurs.”
Hyppönen’s work, nevertheless, has definitely not been invisible. As one of many trade’s longest serving cybersecurity figures, he has spent greater than 35 years preventing malware. When he began within the late Eighties, the time period “malware” was nonetheless removed from on a regular basis parlance; the phrases as an alternative had been pc “virus” or “trojans.” The web was nonetheless one thing few individuals had entry to, and a few viruses relied on infecting computer systems with floppy disks.
Since then, Hyppönen estimated he has analyzed hundreds of various sorts of malware. And because of his frequent talks at conferences everywhere in the world, he has develop into some of the recognizable faces and revered voices of the cybersecurity group.
Whereas Hyppönen has spent a lot of his life making an attempt to maintain malware from entering into locations it’s not alleged to, now he’s nonetheless doing a lot of the identical, albeit a barely completely different tack: His new problem is to guard individuals in opposition to drones.
Hyppönen, who’s Finnish, instructed me throughout a latest interview that he lives about two hours away from Finland’s border with Russia. An more and more hostile Russia and its 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the place nearly all of deaths have reportedly come from unmanned aerial assaults, have made Hyppönen imagine he can have renewed impression by preventing drones.
For Hyppönen, additionally it is a matter of recognizing that whereas there are nonetheless long-standing issues to unravel on the planet of cybersecurity — malware shouldn’t be going anyplace and there are many new issues on the horizon — the trade has made big strides over the past twenty years. An iPhone, Hyppönen introduced up for example, is an especially safe gadget. The cybersecurity points of drone warfare, alternatively, stay virtually uncharted territory.
From viruses and worms to malware and spy ware…
Hyppönen began early in cybersecurity by hacking video video games in the course of the Eighties. His love for cybersecurity got here from reverse engineering software program to determine a option to take away anti-piracy protections from a Commodore 64 video games console. He realized to code by growing journey video games, and sharpened his reverse engineering abilities by analyzing malware at his first job at Finnish firm Data Fellows, which later grew to become the well-known antivirus maker F-Safe.
Since then, Hyppönen has been on the entrance traces of the battle in opposition to malware, witnessing the way it advanced.
Within the early years, virus writers developed their malicious code usually solely out of ardour and curiosity to see what was attainable with code alone. Whereas some cyberespionage existed, hackers had but to find methods to monetize hacking by at present’s requirements, like ransomware assaults. There was no cryptocurrency to facilitate extortion, nor a prison market for stolen information.
Type.A, for instance, was some of the frequent viruses within the early Nineteen Nineties, which contaminated computer systems with a floppy disk. A model of that virus didn’t destroy something — generally simply displaying a message on the individual’s display, and that was it. However the virus travelled all over the world, together with touchdown on the analysis stations on the South Pole, Hyppönen instructed me.
Hyppönen recounted the notorious ILOVEYOU virus, which he and his colleagues had been the primary to find in 2000. ILOVEYOU was wormable, which means it unfold robotically from pc to pc. It arrived by way of e mail as a textual content file, purportedly a love letter. If the goal opened it, it could overwrite and corrupt some information on the individual’s pc, after which ship itself to all their contacts.
The virus contaminated over 10 million Home windows computer systems worldwide.
Malware has modified dramatically since then. Nearly nobody develops malware as a pastime, and creating malicious software program that self-replicates is virtually a assure that it’ll get caught by cybersecurity defenders able to neutralizing it rapidly, and doubtlessly catching its creator.
Nobody does it for the love of the sport anymore, in accordance with Hyppönen. “The age of viruses is firmly behind us,” he stated.
Seldom will we now see self-spreading worms — with uncommon exceptions, such because the harmful WannaCry ransomware assault by North Korea in 2017; and the NotPetya mass-hacking marketing campaign launched by Russia later that 12 months, which crippled a lot of the Ukrainian web and energy grid. Now, malware is sort of solely utilized by cybercriminals, spies, and mercenary spy ware makers who develop exploits for government-backed hacking and espionage. These teams sometimes keep within the shadows, and need to maintain their instruments hidden to proceed their actions and to keep away from cybersecurity defenders or legislation enforcement.
The opposite variations at present are that the cybersecurity trade is now estimated to be value $250 billion. The trade has professionalized, partly as a necessity, to battle the rise in malware assaults. Defenders went from giving freely their software program without spending a dime, to turning it right into a paid service or product, stated Hyppönen.
Computer systems and newer innovations like smartphones, which started to take off in the course of the early 2000s, have develop into a lot tougher to hack. If the instruments to hack an iPhone or the Chrome browser price six-figures or perhaps a few million {dollars}, Hyppönen argued, this successfully makes an exploit so costly that solely the extremely resourced, like governments, can use them, fairly than financially motivated cybercriminals. That’s an enormous win for customers, and for the cybersecurity trade that’s a job nicely achieved.
From preventing spies and criminals… to countering drones
In mid-2025, Hyppönen pivoted from cybersecurity to a unique type of defensive work. He grew to become the chief analysis officer at Sensofusion, a Helsinki-based firm that develops an anti-drone system for legislation enforcement companies and the navy.
Hyppönen instructed me that was motivated to get right into a growing new trade due to what he noticed taking place in Ukraine, a struggle outlined by drones. As a Finnish citizen, who serves within the navy reserves (“I can’t inform you what I do, however I can inform you that they don’t give me a rifle as a result of I’m far more harmful with a keyboard,” he tells me), and with two grandfathers who fought the Russians, Hyppönen is aware of the presence of an enemy simply over his nation’s border.
“The scenario may be very, crucial to me,” he tells me. “It’s extra significant to work preventing in opposition to drones, not simply the drones that we see at present, but additionally the drones of tomorrow,” he stated. “We’re on the aspect of people in opposition to machines, which sounds somewhat bit like science fiction, however that’s very concretely what we do.”
The cybersecurity and drone industries could appear leagues aside from each other, however there are clear parallels between preventing malware and preventing drones, in accordance with Hyppönen. To battle malware, cybersecurity firms have provide you with mechanisms, often called signatures, to determine what’s malware and what’s not after which detect and block it. Within the case of drones, Hyppönen defined, defenses contain constructing programs that may find and jam radio drones, and by recognizing frequencies which might be getting used to regulate the autonomous automobiles.
Hyppönen defined that it’s attainable to determine and detect drones by recording their radio frequencies, often called their IQ samples.
“We detect the protocol from there and construct up signatures for detecting unknown drones,” he stated.
He additionally defined that if you happen to detect the protocol and frequencies used to regulate the drone, you may as well attempt to conduct cyberattacks in opposition to it. You possibly can trigger the drone’s system to malfunction, and crash the drone into the bottom. “So in some ways, these protocol degree assaults are a lot, a lot simpler within the drone world as a result of step one is the final step,” Hyppönen stated. “If you happen to discover a vulnerability, you’re achieved.”
The technique in preventing malware and preventing drones shouldn’t be the one factor that hasn’t modified in his life. The cat-and-mouse recreation of studying learn how to cease a risk, after which the enemy studying from that and devising new methods to get round defenses, and on and on, is similar on the planet of drones. After which, there’s the id of the enemy.
“I spent a giant a part of my profession preventing in opposition to Russian malware assaults,” he stated. “Now I’m preventing Russian drone assaults.”
