<
https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/04/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
blond 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 meetups.
“I often call this ‘cybersecurity Tetris,’” he tells the audience with a
serious face, rattling 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."
Via Violet Blue’s
Threat Model - Cybersecurity: April 7, 2026
https://www.patreon.com/posts/cybersecurity-7-154983896
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
