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-up

Gaming·April 5, 2026·3 min read

The Lead

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.

Key Details

“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.

Context

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.

What's Next

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.