Quotes from Mikko Hypponen

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.

In the 1980s, in the communist Eastern Germany, if you owned a typewriter, you had to register it with the government. You had to register a sample sheet of text out of the typewriter. And this was done so the government could track where text was coming from.

I'm a hacker, but I'm the good kind of hackers. And I've never been a criminal.

I believe in the freedom of the net, but I don't believe in the freedom of the net at the cost of having these online criminal gangs running completely loose and using the freedom of the net to steal everybody's money and take away the trust we have.

You can get the best locksmith in the world to design the best lock he can design, is it pick proof? No, it's not: it can be very hard to pick, but it is pickable. Because you can get, say, the next 10 best locksmiths, and give them unlimited money and time, they will figure out a way to pick it.

It's more than unsettling to realize there are large companies out there developing backdoors, exploits and trojans.

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.

You should have mechanisms of communication, like faxes, which are obviously getting removed from offices because nobody uses them anymore. Faxes are great when e-mail doesn't work. I wouldn't be throwing them away.

The vast majority of the online crime cases, we don't even know which continent the attacks are coming from. And even if we are able to find online criminals, quite often there is no outcome. The local police don't act, or if they do, there's not enough evidence, or for some reason we can't take them down.

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 friendly to each other. It seems that everyone knows everyone else.

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.