Mikko Hyppönen
More info
- Known for
- Malware research, Hyppönen's law
- Affiliation
- F-Secure, WithSecure
Finnish malware researcher who spent over three decades at F-Secure and coined the law that anything smart is also vulnerable.
Hyppönen joined Data Fellows — later renamed F-Secure — in 1991 and ran its research for many years. He is one of the few antivirus veterans to become a public figure: conference keynoter, TED speaker and patient explainer of why the same attack patterns keep coming back, decade after decade.
In 2011 he travelled to Lahore and knocked on the door of the Alvi brothers, who had written Brain — the first PC virus — in 1986 and were still at the address printed inside its code. His law, if it's smart, it's vulnerable, became the title of a 2022 book and is about as good a summary of the IoT era as anyone has managed.