After fighting malware for decades, this cybersecurity veteran is now hacking drones
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Cybersecurity expert shifting to drone security, with technical insights on IoT/embedded security.
After 35 years fighting malware at companies like F-Secure, cybersecurity veteran Mikko Hyppönen has shifted his focus to defending against drones, a threat he considers largely uncharted compared to modern mobile security. In his 2025 Black Hat keynote, he used the 'cybersecurity Tetris' analogy—where successes vanish and failures accumulate—to describe the invisible nature of security work. His pivot is driven by proximity to the Russia-Ukraine border and the high casualty count from unmanned aerial attacks in that conflict.
- Incorporate drone-based attack vectors into your threat modeling and physical security architecture, especially for edge or geographically sensitive deployments.
For a solutions architect tracking emerging threats, this signals that security paradigms must expand beyond software to physical attack surfaces like drones, which could disrupt cloud infrastructure, data centers, and edge deployments.