Mikko Hypponen paces back and forth across the stage with his trademark dark blonde ponytail pinned to an immaculate teal suit. An experienced speaker, he’s trying to make an important point to a room full of fellow hackers and security researchers at the industry’s global annual meeting.
“I often call it ‘cybersecurity Tetris,'” he tells the audience with a serious face about the rules of the classic video game. When you complete an entire row of bricks, the row disappears, leaving the remaining bricks in a new row.
“So your successes disappear, while your failures pile up,” he told the audience. during his keynote speech 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.”
However, Hypponen’s work has certainly not been invisible. As one of the longest-serving cybersecurity personnel in the industry, he has spent over 35 years fighting malware. When he started in the late 1980s, the term “malware” was still far from everyday parlance; Instead the words were computer “virus” or “trojan”. The Internet was still something few people had access to, and few viruses depended on infecting computers. floppy disk.
Since then, Hypnon estimates that it has analyzed thousands of different types of malware. And because of his frequent speaking engagements at conferences around the world, he has become one of the cybersecurity community’s most recognizable faces and respected voices.
While Hypponen has spent most of his life preventing malware from getting into places it shouldn’t, he’s now doing the same, albeit in a slightly different way: His new challenge is protecting people from drones.
Hypponen, who is Finnish, told me during a recent interview that he lives about two hours from Finland’s border with Russia. An increasingly hostile Russia and its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, where most deaths The losses have reportedly come from unmanned air strikes, leading Hypponen to believe he can make a renewed impact by fighting drones.
For Hypponen, it’s also a matter of recognizing that while there are still long-standing problems to solve in the cybersecurity world — malware isn’t going anywhere and there are plenty of new problems on the horizon — the industry has made huge strides over the past two decades. An iPhone, which Hypnoen cited as an example, is an extremely secure device. Cybersecurity aspects of drone warfare, on the other hand, remain virtually uncharted territory.
From viruses and worms to malware and spyware…
Hypponen introduced cybersecurity by hacking video games during the 1980s. His love of cybersecurity came from reverse engineering software to figure out a way to remove anti-piracy protection from a Commodore 64 home computer. He learned to code by developing adventure games, and sharpened his reverse engineering skills by analyzing malware in his first job at the Finnish company Data Fellows, which later became the renowned antivirus maker F-Secure.
Since then, Hypnoten has been on the front lines of the fight against malware and has seen how it has evolved.
In the early years, virus writers often developed their malicious code specifically out of passion and curiosity to see what was possible with code alone. While some cyber espionage existed, hackers had yet to discover ways to monetize hacking by today’s standards, such as ransomware attacks. There were no cryptocurrencies to facilitate extortion, nor was there any criminal market for stolen data.
Form.AFor example, one of the most common viruses in the early 1990s was , which infected computers with floppy disks. One version of that virus didn’t destroy anything – sometimes just displayed a message on the person’s screen, and that was it. But the virus spread around the world, including landing on research stations at the South Pole, Hypponen told me.
Hypnonen told about the infamous ilvyu virusWhich he and his colleagues first discovered in 2000. ILOVEYOU was wormable, meaning it automatically spread from one computer to another. It came via email in the form of a text file, purportedly a love letter. If the target opened it, it would overwrite and corrupt some files on the person’s computer, and then send itself to all of their contacts.
This virus infected more than 10 million Windows computers worldwide.
Malware has changed dramatically since then. Virtually no one develops malware as a hobby, and creating self-replicating malicious software is practically a guarantee that it will be caught by cybersecurity defenders who are able to quickly neutralize it, and potentially catch its author.
According to Hypponen, no one does it for the love of the sport anymore. “The era of the virus is firmly behind us,” he said.
We rarely see insects spreading on their own anymore – except for rare exceptions such as destructive WannaCry ransomware attack by North Korea in 2017; and the NotPetya mass-hacking campaign launched by russia Later that year, it shut down much of the Ukrainian internet and power grid. Now, malware is used almost exclusively by cybercriminals, spies, and hired spyware makers who develop exploits for government-backed hacking and espionage. Those groups generally stay in the shadows, and seek to keep their devices hidden to continue their activities and avoid cybersecurity defenders or law enforcement.
The other difference today is that the cybersecurity industry is now estimated to be worth $250 billion. To fight the increase in malware attacks, the industry has seen professionalization as a necessity. Defenders have pivoted from giving away their software for free to turning it into a paid service or product, Hypponen said.
New inventions such as computers and smartphones, which debuted in the early 2000s, have become much more difficult to hack. If the tools to hack an iPhone or Chrome browser cost six figures or even a few million dollars, Hypponen argued, this effectively makes an exploit so expensive that only the highly resourceful, such as governments, rather than economically motivated cybercriminals can use them. This is a big win for consumers, and a good thing for the cybersecurity industry.
From fighting spies and criminals to combating drones
In mid-2025, Hypnon turned from cybersecurity to a different kind of defensive work. He became chief research officer at Sensofusion, a Helsinki-based company that develops an anti-drone system for law enforcement agencies and the military.
Hypponen told me he was inspired to get involved in a growing new industry after watching the war defined by drones in Ukraine. As a Finnish citizen who served in the military reserves (“I can’t tell you what I do, but I can tell you they don’t give me a rifle because I’m too destructive with a keyboard,” he tells me), and with two grandfathers who fought with the Russians, Hypponen is well aware of the presence of an enemy on his country’s border.
“The situation is very, very important to me,” he tells me. “It makes more sense to fight against drones, not just the drones we see today, but the drones of the future.” “We’re on the side of humans against machines, which sounds a bit like science fiction, but that’s what we do in a very concrete way.”
According to Hypponen, the cybersecurity and drone industries may seem separate from each other, but there are clear parallels between fighting malware and fighting drones. To fight malware, cybersecurity companies have come up with mechanisms, known as signatures, that identify what is malware and what is not and then detect and block it. In the case of drones, Hypponen explained, defenses include systems that can detect radio drones and jam them, and recognize the frequencies that are being used to control autonomous vehicles.
Hypponen explained that it is possible to identify and locate drones by recording their radio frequencies, known as their IQ sample.
“We figure out the protocols from there and create signatures to detect unidentified drones,” he said.
He also pointed out that if you trace the protocols and frequencies used to control a drone, you can also try to carry out cyber attacks against it. You can cause the drone’s systems to malfunction and cause the drone to fall to the ground. “So in many ways, these protocol level attacks are much easier in the drone world because the first step is the last step,” Hypponen said. “If you find a vulnerability, you’re done.”
The strategy of fighting malware and fighting drones is not the only thing that has not changed in their lives. The game of cat and mouse of learning how to stop a threat, and then the enemy learning from that and devising new ways to defend against it, is the same game in the world of drones. And then, there is the identity of the enemy.
“I spent a large part of my career fighting against Russian malware attacks,” he said. “Now I’m fighting Russian drone attacks.”
