About Mikko Hypponen: Mikko Hermanni Hyppönen is a computer security expert and columnist.
There is a difference between the stuff that people put online themselves, like pictures and their trips and flights and meals they've eaten, than the stuff that they don't realize is also going into foreign computers. Like, for example, copies of yo...
The truth is, consumer-grade antivirus products can't protect against targeted malware created by well-resourced nation-states with bulging budgets. They can protect you against run-of-the-mill malware: banking trojans, keystroke loggers and e-mail w...
I'm a hacker, but I'm the good kind of hackers. And I've never been a criminal.
We're risking the future of the net. People are already losing their trust. Once you get burned once - somebody steals your credit card, or makes a purchase on your account - people tend to stay away from online commerce and from trusting online serv...
It's high time for a fresh European alternative to enter the market, taking the existing Internet behemoths head on. What the world needs now is a cloud storage service that is not subject to uncontrolled access by intelligence agencies.
The United States has an unfair advantage, as most of the popular cloud services, search engines, computer and mobile operating systems or web browsers are made by U.S. companies. When the rest of the world uses the net, they are effectively using U....
U.S. intelligence has the legal right to monitor foreign communications as they go through to U.S. service providers. However, even though something is legal doesn't make it right. I'm not American; I don't really care about what data is being collec...
Stuxnet, Duqu and Flame are not normal, everyday malware, of course. All three of them were most likely developed by a Western intelligence agency as part of covert operations that weren't meant to be discovered. The fact that the malware evaded dete...
I've spent my life defending the Net, and I do feel that if we don't fight online crime, we are running a risk of losing it all.
Foreigners like me have no privacy rights whatsoever. Yet we keep using U.S.-based services all the time, making us a legal target for gathering and storing our private information. Other countries do surveillance as well. But nobody has the global v...
Nuclear scientists lost their innocence when we used the atom bomb for the very first time. So we could argue computer scientists lost their innocence in 2009 when we started using malware as an offensive attack weapon.
It's not publicly known, but antivirus companies co-operate all the time. On the surface, antivirus vendors are direct competitors. And in fact, the competition is fierce on the sales and marketing side. But on the technical side, we're actually very...
Antivirus systems need to strike a balance between detecting all possible attacks without causing any false alarms. And while we try to improve on this all the time, there will never be a solution that is 100 percent perfect.
It's been a bit sad to see that out of Linux distributions, it was Android - the most successful mobile Linux distribution - that has really introduced the malware problem to the Linux world.
We want to detect malware, regardless of its source or purpose. Politics don't even enter the discussion, nor should they. Any malware, even targeted, can get out of hand and cause 'collateral damage' to machines that aren't the intended victim.
