Mikko Hyppönen is pacing forwards and backwards 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 vital level to a room filled with fellow hackers and safety researchers at one of many trade’s international annual meet-ups.
“I typically name this ‘cybersecurity Tetris’,” he tells the viewers with a severe face, reeling off the foundations of the traditional online game. If you full an entire 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… whenever you do your job completely, the top result’s that nothing occurs.”
Hyppönen’s work, nevertheless, has actually not been invisible. As one of many trade’s longest serving cybersecurity figures, he has spent greater than 35 years combating 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 laptop “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 change 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 moving into locations it isn’t purported to, now he’s nonetheless doing a lot of the identical, albeit a barely completely different tack: His new problem is to guard individuals towards drones.
Hyppönen, who’s Finnish, advised me throughout a current 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 consider he can have renewed affect by combating drones.
For Hyppönen, additionally it is a matter of recognizing that whereas there are nonetheless long-standing issues to unravel on this planet of cybersecurity — malware just isn’t going wherever and there are many new issues on the horizon — the trade has made enormous strides during the last 20 years. An iPhone, Hyppönen introduced up for instance, is an especially safe machine. The cybersecurity elements of drone warfare, then again, stay nearly uncharted territory.
Picture Credit:courtesy of Mikko Hypponen
From viruses and worms to malware and adware…
Hyppönen began early in cybersecurity by hacking video video games through the Eighties. His love for cybersecurity got here from reverse engineering software program to determine a method to take away anti-piracy protections from a Commodore 64 video games console. He realized to code by creating journey video games, and sharpened his reverse engineering abilities by analyzing malware at his first job at Finnish firm Knowledge Fellows, which later turned the well-known antivirus maker F-Safe.
Since then, Hyppönen has been on the entrance strains of the struggle towards malware, witnessing the way it developed.
Within the early years, virus writers developed their malicious code typically completely out of ardour and curiosity to see what was doable with code alone. Whereas some cyberespionage existed, hackers had but to find methods to monetize hacking by as we speak’s requirements, like ransomware assaults. There was no cryptocurrency to facilitate extortion, nor a legal market for stolen knowledge.
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 — typically simply displaying a message on the particular person’s display screen, and that was it. However the virus travelled world wide, together with touchdown on the analysis stations on the South Pole, Hyppönen advised me.
Hyppönen recounted the notorious ILOVEYOU virus, which he and his colleagues had been the primary to find in 2000. ILOVEYOU was wormable, that means it unfold robotically from laptop to laptop. It arrived through e-mail as a textual content file, purportedly a love letter. If the goal opened it, it might overwrite and corrupt some recordsdata on the particular person’s laptop, 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. Just about 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, based on Hyppönen. “The age of viruses is firmly behind us,” he stated.
Seldom can we now see self-spreading worms — with uncommon exceptions, such because the damaging WannaCry ransomware assault by North Korea in 2017; and the NotPetya mass-hacking marketing campaign launched by Russia later that yr, which crippled a lot of the Ukrainian web and energy grid. Now, malware is nearly completely utilized by cybercriminals, spies, and mercenary adware makers who develop exploits for government-backed hacking and espionage. These teams sometimes keep within the shadows, and need to preserve their instruments hidden to proceed their actions and to keep away from cybersecurity defenders or regulation enforcement.
The opposite variations as we speak are that the cybersecurity trade is now estimated to be price $250 billion. The trade has professionalized, partially as a necessity, to struggle the rise in malware assaults. Defenders went from gifting away their software program at no cost, to turning it right into a paid service or product, stated Hyppönen.
Computer systems and newer innovations like smartphones, which started to take off through the early 2000s, have change into a lot more durable to hack. If the instruments to hack an iPhone or the Chrome browser value 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, reasonably than financially motivated cybercriminals. That’s an enormous win for shoppers, and for the cybersecurity trade that’s a job effectively completed.
Picture Credit:courtesy of Mikko Hypponen
From combating spies and criminals… to countering drones
In mid-2025, Hyppönen pivoted from cybersecurity to a unique sort of defensive work. He turned the chief analysis officer at Sensofusion, a Helsinki-based firm that develops an anti-drone system for regulation enforcement businesses and the navy.
Hyppönen advised me that was motivated to get right into a creating new trade due to what he noticed occurring in Ukraine, a conflict outlined by drones. As a Finnish citizen, who serves within the navy reserves (“I can’t let you know what I do, however I can let you know that they don’t give me a rifle as a result of I’m rather more damaging with a keyboard,” he tells me), and with two grandfathers who fought the Russians, Hyppönen is conscious about the presence of an enemy simply over his nation’s border.
“The scenario could be very, crucial to me,” he tells me. “It’s extra significant to work combating towards drones, not simply the drones that we see as we speak, but additionally the drones of tomorrow,” he stated. “We’re on the facet of people towards machines, which sounds a little bit bit like science fiction, however that’s very concretely what we do.”
The cybersecurity and drone industries could seem leagues aside from each other, however there are clear parallels between combating malware and combating drones, based on Hyppönen. To struggle malware, cybersecurity corporations have provide you with mechanisms, often known as signatures, to establish what’s malware and what’s not after which detect and block it. Within the case of drones, Hyppönen defined, defenses contain constructing techniques that may find and jam radio drones, and by recognizing frequencies which might be getting used to manage the autonomous automobiles.
Hyppönen defined that it’s doable to establish and detect drones by recording their radio frequencies, often known as their IQ samples.
“We detect the protocol from there and construct up signatures for detecting unknown drones,” he stated.
He additionally defined that when you detect the protocol and frequencies used to manage the drone, you can too attempt to conduct cyberattacks towards 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 completed.”
The technique in combating malware and combating drones just isn’t the one factor that hasn’t modified in his life. The cat-and-mouse sport of studying the best way 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 this planet of drones. After which, there’s the identification of the enemy.
“I spent an enormous a part of my profession combating towards Russian malware assaults,” he stated. “Now I’m combating Russian drone assaults.”
