After fighting malware for decades, this cybersecurity veteran is now hacking drones

Mikko 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

From viruses and worms to malware and spyware…

Hyppönen started early in cybersecurity by hacking video games during the 1980s. His love for cybersecurity came from reverse engineering software to figure out a way to remove anti-piracy protections from a Commodore 64 games console. He learned to code by developing adventure games, and sharpened his reverse engineering skills by analyzing malware at his first job at Finnish company Data Fellows, which later became the well-known antivirus maker F-Secure.

Since then, Hyppönen has been on the front lines of the fight against malware, witnessing how it evolved.

In the early years, virus writers developed their malicious code often exclusively out of passion and curiosity to see what was possible with code alone. While some cyberespionage existed, hackers had yet to discover ways to monetize hacking by today’s standards, like ransomware attacks. There was no cryptocurrency to facilitate extortion, nor a criminal marketplace for stolen data.

Form.A, for example, was one of the most common viruses in the early 1990s, which infected computers with a floppy disk. A version of that virus did not destroy anything — sometimes just displaying a message on the person’s screen, and that was it. But the virus travelled around the world, including landing on the research stations at the South Pole, Hyppönen told me.

Hyppönen recounted the infamous ILOVEYOU virus, which he and his colleagues were the first to discover in 2000. ILOVEYOU was wormable, meaning it spread automatically from computer to computer. It arrived via email as 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 their contacts.

The virus infected over 10 million Windows computers worldwide.

Malware has changed dramatically since then. Virtually no one develops malware as a hobby, and creating malicious software that self-replicates is practically a guarantee that it will get caught by cybersecurity defenders capable of neutralizing it quickly, and potentially catching its author.

No one does it for the love of the game anymore, according to Hyppönen. “The age of viruses is firmly behind us,