Mikko Hypponen one of Foreign Policy magazine’s ‘Top 100 Global Thinkers’

Some congratulations are in order after seeing the latest “Top 100 Global Thinkers” list from Foreign Policy magazine.

The 2011 list, published yesterday, includes President Obama, Bill and Melinda Gates, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Jens Stoltenberg (the prime minister of Norway) and F-Secure Chief Research Officer Mikko Hypponen.

Mikko was listed as number 61. The write-up says:

Mikko Hypponen spends his days waist-deep in worms and viruses — of the virtual kind. A leading expert on cybersecurity, he has played a key role in helping us understand — and then stop — some of the dangerous menaces of the digital age. There were the worms Sobig.F, which Hypponen and his team dismantled in 2003, and Sasser, which they spotted in 2004; more recently, he has monitored hacking at Sony, as well as security threats to mobile devices.

Hypponen’s most high-profile case by far, however, is Stuxnet (and Duqu, its recent clone), and here his investigations shed much-needed light on the complex new world of cyberwar, where the bad guys and good guys alike — from shadowy computer hacks to major world powers — are now fighting. Last year, Stuxnet was discovered to have attacked nuclear centrifuges in Iran beginning in 2009. Some suspected Israel, but Hypponen has posited that it was the U.S. government. “If you look at who has the know-how, who has the technology, who has the motive, it’s pretty obvious,” he told Forbes this year.

For Hypponen, who has been consulted by law-enforcement officials on three continents, Stuxnet proves that cyberattacks can affect the offline world — the increasingly networked water, power, and transportation systems that we all rely on. As he put it, “If the Internet doesn’t work, or if computers don’t work, our society doesn’t work.”

Mikko has always been helpful when I’ve come calling, so naturally I think he deserves this honor.

–Bill Brenner

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