From Viruses to Cyberwar: A Conversation with Mikko Hyppönen (Sensofusion).

In this English-language episode of My Precious Data, cybersecurity expert Eddy Willems sits down with one of the most recognized voices in the industry: Mikko Hyppönen, currently with Sensofusion and formerly of WithSecure.

Eddy and Mikko go back to the late 1990s, a time when computer viruses were spreading via floppy disks and email attachments, long before cybercrime became a global industry and cyberwarfare entered mainstream discussions.

This episode is both a journey through the history of cybersecurity and a sharp look at where we are heading.

“We used to fight individuals writing viruses for fun. Today, we are dealing with organized crime and nation-state actors,” says Mikko Hyppönen.

“Cybersecurity has grown from a technical niche into a fundamental part of our society,” adds Eddy Willems.

Together, they explore how the threat landscape has evolved, from early malware outbreaks to modern ransomware, disinformation, and geopolitical cyber conflict.

Topics discussed:

• The early days of antivirus and virus hunting 
• The rise of cybercrime and ransomware 
• Nation-state attacks and cyberwarfare 
• The role of ethics and responsibility in cybersecurity 
• What the future holds in an increasingly connected world 

“The biggest change isn’t technology, it’s who is behind the attacks.” – Mikko Hyppönen

A deep, honest and sometimes nostalgic conversation between two veterans who have witnessed the transformation of cybersecurity from the inside.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Welcome to My Precious Data, the podcast by Eddie Willem, where we explore the world of cybercrime and incidents affecting our society. In this series, we engage in conversations with Eddie Willems, security evangelist, globally recognized cybersecurity expert, and international keynote speaker. Eddie also dives into conversations with fellow experts to share insights and explore new perspectives. Together, we highlight the latest security trends and discuss preventive measures to help avoid these kinds of problems.

SPEAKER_01 0:42

Good morning, good evening, good night, or whenever you're listening, and welcome back to my precious data. My guest today needs little introduction in the cybersecurity world. He's a globally respected cybersecurity expert, a well-known tech speaker, author, and public voice of our industry. I've known him for decades. We met at conferences, events, and discussions all over the world. And today I'm very happy to finally welcome him to the podcast. Miko Hippenen, welcome to my precious data.

SPEAKER_03 1:18

Thank you, Eddie. Thank you for having me.

SPEAKER_01 1:21

So where are we here today, you know? Because it's a little bit weird scene, isn't it?

SPEAKER_03 1:27

Yes, there might be a little bit of noise in the background. We're recording this at the Cybernova conference, Cybernova 2026 in Antwerp, Belgium. Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 1:37

Yeah. So we crossed pasts um many times over the years, uh conferences, panels, events. Do you still remember when we met first?

SPEAKER_03 1:48

It's gotta be gotta be a conference. I'm guessing an early varus bulletin could be. I think so, yeah. The first one I went to was was 1993, Amsterdam.

SPEAKER_01 2:00

No, I didn't do that one, but I think it was 1995 or 96 or something.

SPEAKER_03 2:05

Somewhere there. Did you go to the early iCar conference? Yes, of course. Yeah, maybe, maybe also one of the or maybe Varus Bulletin. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:13

I think it's 96 somewhere. Anyway.

SPEAKER_03 2:16

And I do remember 1993 was the first international conference I attended. Also my first business trip in my life. And of course, after that I did hundreds, maybe thousands of business trips. So of course it's it's it has a uh sweet spot in my my memory. And and I I remember after virus boarding conference in Amsterdam 1993, then next year, 1994, in Jersey Island, that's the first one where I spoke at.

SPEAKER_01 2:44

Mm-hmm. Yeah, wow. Okay, back then cybersecurity was still a niche topic, in my opinion. So did you already feel it would become as important as it is today?

SPEAKER_03 2:55

No, no, no, no. No, nobody did. Um, it was a small problem at the time, and of course there were different aspects to computer security already back then in the early 1990s, but the burning problem was with viruses. And viruses were a real problem, but I guess we we all thought that we could solve the problem somehow. Uh I remember thinking and discussing that, yeah, I mean, this this is an important thing, but surely, you know, Microsoft is gonna fix this. They're gonna, you know, come up with a new version of MS-DOS or new version of Windows, which is somehow going to fix and this whole market for security products will go away. Um and we had seen this happen with other products. Uh at some some stage in history, Windows faxing software, like WinFax, used to be the number one selling software in the world because everybody needed to send faxes at the time, and then if you could do it from Windows without printing anything, it was great. And then Windows or Microsoft released Windows for Workgroups, which had it built in, and the hot that whole market disappeared overnight. And we were certain that that's gonna happen with with uh cybersecurity or with antivirus or anti-malware or EDR. Yeah. And now we are in 2026 and it still hasn't happened. Like Microsoft has become a player in this field, but they didn't make the problem disappear.

SPEAKER_01 4:15

No, indeed, indeed. So let's have a look to those early ages. So which early incident or malware outbreak had the biggest impact on how you think about security today?

SPEAKER_03 4:28

It's gonna be a love letter. Um, I started doing reverse engineering and analyzing viruses in 1991-1992. Um after the first decade, I was pretty pretty good in figuring out how malware works. But they were getting faster and faster in spreading because this internet thing happened and everybody had access to emails suddenly. And then in May 2000, we get this sample early on in the morning, uh, well right after nine o'clock in the morning, about this new piece of malware which is sending these emails which claim to be love letters. And of course, you're receiving it from someone you know, so it's your neighbor or work colleague sending you a love letter. And if you click on it, you're gonna send the same email as you to everybody in your address book. And it spread like wildfire. And I I I remember this case so well because uh when I I was at the time working for F Secure, and we were the first company in the world which which got this sample, which became still the largest email worm outbreak in history, infecting hundreds of millions of systems. Yes, so it really changed how how we looked at this because it opened our eyes on how big an outbreak could become.

SPEAKER_01 5:43

I completely agree with you actually, because actually uh I remember love letters as well, because actually at that moment I was installing an email server in a company, and just when the outbreak started, you can I can tell you, yeah, that was heavy at that moment. Anyway, um so you've been in cybersecurity for a long time. Looking back, was there a moment where you realized this is more than just a technical problem? This affects society?

SPEAKER_03 6:15

That's a great question because I I used to think that the whole problem area really is a technical problem. And at some stage I did realize that those of us who work in security, our job is is not to secure computers. Our job is to secure the whole society. Because slowly but surely everything around us went online, and our governments and societies and everything we use relies on computers and networks. And and the the key moment for me was in August 2003 when the blaster worm hit. Oh, yeah. Because blaster w was such a fast-spreading worm because it wasn't using email, it was using direct network connections. We were speaking about network worms, and this became such a huge problem, and and it was tied to this huge electricity blackout in uh northeastern United States, including New York City. Um and and uh we were confident there was some kind of a link, and there was a link. It didn't cause the blackout, but it did make it worse. It it did make it harder for the electricity providers to recover from the incident. Um and that's the eye-opening moment. Exactly. Lights are going out and there's a worm spreading. Oh my god.

SPEAKER_01 7:37

Yeah, indeed. Yeah, I I also remember it actually. So uh you've witnessed the full evolution from hobbyist malware to organized cybercrime and nation-state operations. So, what's in your opinion, what is the most important turning point?

SPEAKER_03 7:53

It's the same year, 2003. A lot of things like um happened during the defining year of 2003. We just spoke about Blaster, which was a massively large network worm. But during the same year, um we also found the very first uh outbreak of money-making malware. Um and it was such an eye-opener for me because I had been working more than 10 years fighting hobbyists, and then during the summer of 2003, we find this piece of malware which would install a SOX proxy on every infected Windows computer, which means the attackers can now redirect traffic through the infected machines. And I was looking at it, like wondering, well, like I wonder why they're installing a proxy on every machine. And the best guess I had was that, well, then later gonna like connect to these machines and try to hack companies and hide their tracks by by using such an infected machine. But we infected some of our test systems and we left them infected online to see what happens. Two days later, they wake up, start to receive massive amounts of port 25 traffic, 25 TCP. So that's SMTP, that's email.

SPEAKER_02 9:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 9:07

And we uh start looking at all these emails that are being sent to through these infected machines, and they were all VR spam emails. Yeah, and that's when it clicked. Oh my god, these guys are infecting thousands of Windows computers so they can sell them to spammers who are using them to send emails spam. So money suddenly entered the picture. And it was the same year, maybe two months later, that uh in the same lab at F Secure, we were looking at a sample we received from Sweden, which we thought was yet another email worm outbreak, but no one else got infected. It was only this one company, a defense contractor, which was hit. And we were looking at the case. How come it isn't spreading? Like, how the hell did you get this? And they shared an email, which is a very, very targeted email in Swedish, sent by an existing customer with a malicious attachment, so a targeted attack. Yeah, and we tracked down where it came from, it came from China, and we attributed it later to the People's Liberation Army. That was the very first governmental case. So 2003, very first money-making malware outbreak, 2003, very first governmental case, and also 2003, the year of blaster, which took out partly or partly for stat as well.

SPEAKER_01 10:24

Important yeah, yeah. Do you think today's threats are as uh more dangerous or just more visible?

SPEAKER_03 10:32

They are more dangerous, and and and these things are becoming more dangerous the more time passes. Because when technology becomes good enough, eventually we can't live without it. It becomes mandatory, and this is slowly but surely happening with connectivity and and internet itself and many of the services we use. But I guess the best example on how a technology innovation becomes mandatory for the society is electricity. Yeah. Because we don't even think about it. We think it's been around forever, it hasn't been around forever. Most cities got electricity grids 150 years ago, which it's a long time, but it's not that long of a time for the society to become so dependent that our societies will stop if electricity goes out. And that's exactly that's exactly what's happening now with connectivity. Yeah, and it's happening with any other service that becomes useful enough, let's say mobile phones or cloud services, or now starting to happen with generative AI.

SPEAKER_01 11:34

Yeah, yeah, true. Yeah. Um, something completely different, you know. Um, actually, we are both known public speakers, but you're, well, in my opinion, the best known public speaker in cybersecurity. Thank you, Eddie. Including on the TET stage. Actually, I also did the TATIC stage, but anyway. Where are we first to your TET uh talk, actually? So yeah, yeah. So why do you think storytelling is so important in our field?

SPEAKER_03 12:04

Storytelling is important in any field. That's how people remember what they're being told. People like to listen to stories, and I believe it's in our genes. If you think about our great-great-great-grandfathers and mothers, the ones of our predecessors who loved to sit around the fire and listen to stories told by others, they lived longer. They had had a better chance of surviving. They learned like how to hunt, how to avoid getting killed. They they learned it from others because they like to listen to stories, which means the genes of the people who like to listen to stories were passed on to us. That's why we like to listen to stories. And if you want to educate someone, if you want to make them remember what you're telling, turn it into a story.

SPEAKER_01 12:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 12:54

Yesterday I was visiting a company and they had just been hit with the malware outbreak. And you know, and people like l sit up and start to listen. What happened at the company yesterday? Just because it's a story. Yeah. You could tell the same thing by just telling the theory, but you know, remember to take backups, you know. That's boring. Nobody's gonna remember that.

SPEAKER_01 13:14

No, I totally agree. Actually, that's also the reason why I'm using it as well. So, but looking at all these kind of things, of course, because a lot of there is also a lot of misunderstanding, I think. So, what's the biggest misunderstanding about cybersecurity that you still hear from non-technical audiences? Because you also talk to a lot of non-technical audiences as well, I suppose. Sure. So, um, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 13:39

It's gotta do with the fact that when security works, it's invisible. And this applies both to real-world security, but even more to cyber security. Like when we do our job perfectly, when we succeed 100%, the outcome simply is that nothing happens. Because we're prevented bad things from happening, and people don't notice when things don't happen. Rarely is anyone thanked for stopping a disaster which did not happen. And and that's the big challenge we we face. Like people don't think about security until it fails, then they absolutely will see it. So I've often used the term cybersecurity Tetris. Because in the game of Tetris, what you're trying to do is that you're trying to make a whole line. And when you succeed in what you're trying to do, when you make the whole line, it disappears. When you fail to make a whole line, you end up with this mess which everybody sees. So your successes disappear while your failures pile up for everyone to see. That's what cybersecurity and security in general looks like. And people don't really understand that they can't see our successes because they're invisible.

SPEAKER_01 14:55

So, AI and the future of attacks. Um, AI is now part of both attack and defense. So, from your perspective, is AI fundamentally changing the threat landscape or accelerating the existing problems?

SPEAKER_03 15:10

Well, I think AI or generative AI is fundamentally changing everything. Not just defense and offense or not just cybersecurity, but everything else as well. I do believe it is the biggest single technological revolution in our time. Um and of course it it's built on top of earlier existing technology revolutions, but it does have the potential of becoming the biggest we've ever seen. And every technological revolution we've seen has brought us benefits and problems. The benefits and problems AI will bring us are likely to be bigger than we've seen with any previous revolution. So if this revolution goes right, it's gonna be excellent. If it goes wrong, it's gonna go very wrong. But I do remain an optimist. I do think all the previous technology revolutions, electricity, connectivity, mobile phones, social media, cloud services, in all of those, I think the upsides are bigger than the downsides. And I do think, I like to think, I like to hope, it's gonna happen with generative AI as well.

SPEAKER_01 16:21

Yeah, me too. So are we at risk of overtrusting automation security, maybe?

SPEAKER_03 16:26

There is a very real risk, but we have to manage the risk, and the benefits are so big that we should take the risk. What I mean by this is that traditional security is built on detecting badness. Knowing what bad looks like, and then detecting bad things and things that are likely to be bad. With AI, we can start to build things that are not detecting badness, but which are detecting weirdness, oddness, curious things which might not be bad by themselves, but which should be checked out anyway because they are so rare and odd. And it's hard to do this with you know manpower or with traditional systems, but this is exactly the area where generative AI shines. Like you give it terabytes of logs. Here's the last five years of our company, read through everything, figure out what normal looks like, and then start looking in real time about what's happening right now and tell me every time you see something weird.

SPEAKER_02 17:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 17:29

And that's so powerful because it's very hard for the attackers to avoid being weird. Yeah, they can fairly easily avoid being something which is known to be bad. Simply create something new which is bad, which has never been seen before, and you will avoid many of the current detections. But it's still gonna be weird, it's still gonna be rare, it's still gonna be something that should be checked out, and that's where the upside is, and that's why I remain an optimist.

SPEAKER_01 17:54

Yeah, good. Now, you've recently moved into the anti-drone industry, which is fascinating actually. Uh, what similarities do you see between cybersecurity and the drone defense kind of thing?

SPEAKER_03 18:11

I did spend 34 years working in cybersecurity, all of which I spent at the same company. I joined DataFellows in 1991, which then renamed itself to F Secure and later to Witsecure. And the guy who hired me in 1991, Risto, I I walked into his office last summer to resign after 34 years. And the reason why I did that is very simple. There's a war in Europe. There's a war dead center of Europe. I live in Finland, I live two hours from the Russian border, and I saw it as as a duty for myself to apply the learnings I've gathered over these decades from the cybersecurity world and apply them to drone defense. Because the war in Ukraine and now the war in Iran, they both look completely different from the wars we've seen before. These are new kinds of wars where these swarms of drones completely change the landscape of the war, and the front lines have never looked like what they look like today. And there's a lot of things I've learned how we can apply the learnings from cyber world into drone defense. These are both very technical fields. These are both fields where the enemy is trying to build new attacks, which are trying to avoid detection. And when you detect them, they will change behavior. They will try to hide in new ways and new mechanisms. And we have to look for them, collect samples, analyze the samples, build detections, build updates, test the updates, ship the updates to all the customers so everybody detects the new malware or the new drones. Yeah. Now, of course, there's this differences as well. We're not looking at binary code or exe files, we're looking at radio traffic sent by the pilot of drones to the drones themselves. But there's lots of similarities, and that's that's what I'm doing in my work today at SensorFusion.

SPEAKER_01 20:11

Exactly. Okay. Do you think the uh security industry underestimated how quickly how quickly cyber physical threats would emerge?

SPEAKER_03 20:20

Yeah, I think so. Uh obviously we had wake-up calls in in the shape of um real world getting affected, and then maybe Stuxnet in 2000 and then being the single largest wake-up call, and also probably the first case where a cyber weapon could have caused loss of life. We don't know if Stuxnet killed anyone, but it could have killed two people. So it's that's a big big uh line to cross. But I don't think we really fully understood how dependent uh physical things are becoming from the cyber world. Uh, IoT revolution and the OT revolution in factories has totally changed the way connectivity is is is thought about. And I guess it's now been 10 years since I uh uttered the words which later became known as the hyponnen law, which is that if it's smart, it's vulnerable. Exactly. When we add programmability and connectivity into everyday devices, they they become smart, but at the very same time they also become hackable. And that's a very, very pessimistic law, but it's also true.

SPEAKER_01 21:29

True. I totally agree. Yeah. So cybersecurity now touches elections, hospitals, critical infrastructure, and even warfare. Do you think governments and society truly understand what's at stake?

SPEAKER_03 21:43

No. And and the um the reason why they don't. I see the same problem everywhere around the world. In Europe, in North America, in South America, in Asia. The core problem is that for a reason or another, our politicians. Don't get the problem because they're not technical. There's very few engineers in parliaments, very few programmers as ministers or presidents. How many engineers do you have in your House of Parliament in Belgium? Oh my god, not many. Not many. Yeah. Same thing in Finland. We do have a couple. But you if you look at, for example, Finland, which is a very tech-heavy country, very nerdy country, and a lot of technologic companies, and then you look at our decision makers. They they have a hard time understanding how what's at stake and how to rule all of this because they're not technical. And if you're not technical, you naturally shy away from technical topics and you you know direct towards the topics that you're you're good at. And and that's a hard problem to solve. And don't don't uh misunderstand me. I am not running for position myself. I'm not gonna enter politics myself. But I wish more people like us would. True.

SPEAKER_01 22:59

Now, if you could change one thing about how policymakers think about cybersecurity, what would it be?

SPEAKER_03 23:05

It's a great question. Reminds me about what I always tell to young people when I'm speaking to them. For example, when I go to universities or or places like that, what I tell to these people, people in their 20s, is that if you want to change the world, and many of them want to change the world, if you want to change the world, the best way to change the world is through technology. Yes. Not through politics, not through finance, not through philosophy. Technology. Technology changes the world. You look at the biggest things that have changed the world over the last 30 years, it's always technology. It's always technology. You look at the most powerful entities in the world, tech companies. I mean, these large companies like Google and Apple and others from California, they are bigger than many countries. Their revenues are bigger than many countries' budgets. They hold more political power than many small countries. And they've come from nowhere. 30 years ago, the most valuable companies on the planet were oil companies. Today all the most valuable companies are data companies. And that's what the decision makers and policymakers should understand.

SPEAKER_01 24:14

Something completely different again. So without naming names, what's one incident or trend that made you think we're not prepared for this?

SPEAKER_03 24:22

That's probably not Petya. So 2017, the Russian cyber weapon, part of the war that Russia is waging on Ukraine, where they really tried using a cyber weapon targeting only Ukraine, but it escaped the fear of the war and started hitting targets all around the world, becoming probably the most expensive single cyber incident in history. And, you know, the fact that it was deployed as a supply chain attack where companies and entities got hit because they were running a particular piece of software and simply received a normal-looking software update, that's a really eye-opening thing for me. And I remember thinking exactly that that I don't think we're very well prepared to fight problems like this.

SPEAKER_01 25:11

Yeah, true. So have you ever been genuinely surprised by how attackers operated? Over and over again.

SPEAKER_03 25:19

I I think attackers have opened my eyes many times. The first time I heard about Bitcoin. Yeah. First time I heard about Bitcoin was a Bitcoin miner um 2011 or 12, somewhere early on, which is a great example on how quickly attackers move and adopt new technologies. I mean, I should I'm following technology. I should have known about Bitcoin before we found a piece of malware trying to mine them illegally, but I didn't. That's how fast they move. Another uh great example on how attackers surprise us, um, these different attacks where they've been trying to gain access to open source projects, like for example, the supply chain attack against the XZ uh uh compression algorithm, where uh nation-state actors took months to befriend the main developer and start to take tasks from him to make his life easier and do all these social engineering tricks to gain the trust. And then once you have the keys to the kingdom, you can actually update this program, which is used by millions of users around the world, then you can start deploying attacks in there. That's that's thinking outside the box. True. Unfortunately, the not all the attackers are stupid.

SPEAKER_01 26:30

Yeah, I know. So, um some personal reflection. So after decades in the industry, what still motivates you?

SPEAKER_03 26:40

Well, I'm not sure I have a good answer for that. Because maybe one of the reasons I did the switch from from cyber from working in the cyber industry to to go to working in the drone industry is that uh I also in some ways felt that I've uh I've done everything. In Cyberworld, uh I've I've pretty much done everything you can do. I've been and met all the players, I worked in all the important cases, I've done different um careers inside cyber. I've seen the whole industry grow from the startup phase to this multi-billion dollar industry. I've uh keynoted all the big conferences. I don't think there was much left to do. And I still have, you know, 10 years before I retire. So that was part of my thinking. If I want to do something else than cyber during my lifetime, now's the time to do it. And of course, I haven't left cyber completely. I still follow it very closely, and I have a cyber role inside SensorFusion of obviously and I do talks about cyber, but I'm not working for a cybersecurity company, and I will not be working for a cybersecurity company in my life.

SPEAKER_01 27:50

Okay. So, what do you believe now about cybersecurity that you didn't believe 20 or 30 years ago?

SPEAKER_03 27:58

Well, it felt like it's getting worse and worse. Yeah. And nowadays, I I do think we are in better shape in technical terms than ever before. And hear me out, because I I know this sounds a bit surprising, maybe, because we keep hearing about data breaches and data leaks and outbreaks and ransomware incidents, and it feels like uh the situation is pretty bad. However, if we just take a step back and look at where we are today and where we were 10 years ago, 15 years ago, 10 years ago, the biggest problem still was that users would surf the web and click on a link with their web browser and they would get infected by a drive by downloads which would exploit a vulnerability in Java or in Flash inside their browser. We don't have that anymore. It's actually very, very safe to surf the web today. It used to be the biggest problem, used to be a huge problem. We fixed that. We fixed that by improving browser security and by improving operating system security. And if you if you look a little bit beyond 10 years, mobile phones, mobile phones and tablets, i iPads, i iOS, even Androids, much, much more secure systems than our traditional computers. So we are getting better, we are making things harder to hack. It doesn't always feel like that, but if you look at it from a little bit uh bigger perspective, that's exactly what's happening. And it does have the flip side, which is that if it's getting harder and harder to exploit the technical vulnerabilities, then the attackers will go through humans. Yeah. That's why we see so many incidents where uh people are fooled by with phishing attacks or they lose their credentials or they lose their access tokens or something like that. True, there are a lot of scams. That's that's that's the next way to get in, and and that's that's what's happening.

SPEAKER_01 29:50

Yeah, that's still a problem indeed. So are you are you optimistic or pessimistic about it a little bit? I am I choose to be an optimist. Like me.

SPEAKER_03 29:58

I want to be an optimist, yeah, and I am an optimist, despite everything I've seen over these decades. I've seen the worst that technology brings us. I still do think that it's getting better. And I I haven't always been an optimist. I actually stole this mindset a couple of years ago. I I met this polar explorer, oh, a Norwegian guy. Yeah. Here's a story for you. Okay. We like to listen to stories. Okay. So I met this polar explorer. Okay. And he he was in his 80s. Uh-huh. He had been exploring Greenland and North Pole and South Pole for years and years. He he had this uh this routine of skiing across Greenland uh uh every two years. And he told me about how Greenland had changed. How in the 60s the snow was covering much larger areas, and now every time it goes back, it's covering less and less because of global warming and the climate change. So I asked him about climate change. Like, okay, how do you feel about climate change? And he told me that he's an optimist. He told me he's an optimist about climate change, and I was like, how can you be an optimist? You've seen how bad it is. Yeah, you've seen how snow and ice escape further every year. How can you be an optimist? Yeah. And he told me, well, it's too late to be a pessimist. And I love the mindset. And I said, I'm gonna mindset. I'm gonna steal that. Yeah, so I'm an optimist because it's too late to be a pessimist.

SPEAKER_01 31:24

Yeah, that's that's a real good one. Yeah, nice. I I I will remember that one.

SPEAKER_03 31:28

And you will, because it's a story.

SPEAKER_01 31:30

Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Always. The you know, the power of the story. Yes. No, some advice, maybe. So so for young professionals entering cybersecurity today, what mindset matters more than technical skills? Curiosity.

SPEAKER_03 31:45

That's that's what I'm looking for. When I'm hiring people for technical roles, yeah, curiosity, willingness to learn, uh, wanting the eager to work on hard-to-solve cases, the eagerness to take on challenges, and the mindset that we just discussed, technology. Technology changes the world. I'm looking for people who want to change the world, and I'm looking for people who believe what I believe is that technology is the best way to change the world.

SPEAKER_02 32:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 32:11

So if you're a curious and if you believe in technology, everything's open for you. And and that's that's what young people, those kind of young people really excite me when they are applying for for uh roles, and uh I'm I'm always happy to give them opportunities.

SPEAKER_01 32:27

Okay, well, well, nearly coming to the end, but anyway, oh yes, there is still, of course, the traditional well, question or questions for me, you know. We call it the one million dollar question, something I'm not really aware of, you know. There could be anything, but anyway. So, do you have any questions for me, Miko, before going to in the we have a still rapid fire round, but after that we are closing the podcast.

SPEAKER_03 32:53

Yes, Eddie. I do have a question for you. What's your favorite movie, favorite book, and favorite band?

SPEAKER_01 33:02

Okay. Uh favorite movie, it's always tricky now. I love, you know, science fiction. So I love to watch too Star Trek, well, the series or the movies, everything. Star Trek seems to be nice for me. Uh, it's difficult to state actually uh the best movie, and otherwise maybe they're going to use that in uh in a hacking attack or something like that. And so that's one thing. Uh, concerning my favorite band, it's also tricky because I love music in so many ways. I love Jean-Michel Jarre, actually. Yeah, so I love electronical music. Yes, surprise, surprise. Yeah, well, yeah, that's right. I love dance music as well. So I love the combination, and yeah, if if you put in dance music, I will be on the dance floor, you know. So yeah. So what was uh was it again the uh book the book, hmm. But your book is coming close. Uh yeah, it's it's it's also a difficult one for me, you know. I also wrote books. Um you can't name those. Yeah, no, I can't name those. So but it's uh I think yours is very coming close. It's uh you know, I I I read I don't read a lot. I I read, you know, some specific things. I also read science fiction books. Um I'm not going to name anything because it's it's a little bit too tricky again. Uh but um I I think uh you know also if it's if there is a story in it, I will love it. Yeah. So that's the most important thing. If it's just like non-fiction, it's always tricky for me. It really depends if there are a little bit small or tiny stories inside it. If that's the case, yes, I was I will love it as well. Okay. So that's that's how I looked at it. Okay, okay. Now, so some rapid fire things. I always like these kind of things because you know these this gives away a little bit of what you think about a lot of things as well. Um, so so before we wrap up, a quick rapid fire round. Privacy or security, which is harder to protect?

SPEAKER_03 35:21

Privacy, and we lost the fight on privacy already. We don't have privacy anymore, but I refuse to give up on security. I'm still fighting for security. Oh, nice answer.

SPEAKER_01 35:33

Nation state attacks or cybercrime. What's the bigger long-term risk?

SPEAKER_03 35:39

Cybercrime, because cybercrime is a very democratic attack. Cyber criminals target everybody. Nation states only target very particular, very specific targets. True. Yeah. AI hype or real revolution? AI is real, it's changing the world, and I'm so excited to be alive right now during the defining years where we might become the second most intelligent being on the planet.

SPEAKER_01 36:08

Okay. Okay, interesting. That one. But could be the first in okay, exactly. Uh purely digital threats or cyber physical attacks, which pose the greater risk?

SPEAKER_03 36:25

That's a trick question. They are the same thing. There is no difference between cybersecurity and physical security. It's just security.

SPEAKER_01 36:34

Exactly. Yeah. One word that describes the future of security.

SPEAKER_03 36:40

Innovation. And I think that's always been the key. Always clever people coming up with clever new solutions. It's always saved us. It's gonna save us in the future as well.

SPEAKER_01 36:50

True. Wow. We're coming to an end, unfortunately. And I hope everything went well with the recording because there was a lot of background noise over here. It's a bit windy, yeah. It's a bit windy, yeah. You know, people think, yeah, we are just looking at, you know. What's what's the river? Yeah, this this the schild. Okay, yeah. So um it's yeah, it's it will be I I I'm I we will we will hear it afterwards. But anyway, so Miko, really thank you for this conversation and for the many insights you've shared over the years, one on stage and definitely offstage as well, like this talk. So it was a real pleasure having you on my precious data, and I hope we'll continue continue these conversations again and again in the future. To all our listeners, thank you for listening. Until next time, stay informed, stay critical, and keep your data precious.

SPEAKER_00 37:48

If you have any comments, questions, or suggestions, feel free to email us at podcast at wavci.com. For more information about lectures or keynotes, please visit wavci.com. See you next time.