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. Mikko Hypponen Read Quote
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. Mikko Hypponen Read Quote
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 detection proves how well the attackers did their job. Mikko Hypponen Read Quote
Anonymous is like an amoeba: it’s got too many different operations run by truly different people which might not share a single person with another operation, but they use the same branding – they are part of the Anonymous brand, just like al-Qaida. Mikko Hypponen Read Quote
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 visibility that United States does. Mikko Hypponen Read Quote
Laws and regulations are supposed to restrict the kind of surveillance governments do. In fact, the U.S. government is quite restricted in what kind of surveillance they can do on U.S. citizens. The problem is that 96 percent of the planet is not U.S. citizens. Mikko Hypponen Read Quote
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. Mikko Hypponen Read Quote
Online crime is practically always international, because they almost always cross traditional national borders. Mikko Hypponen Read Quote
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 services. Mikko Hypponen Read Quote
