Mikko Hypponen

We're living the hottest AI summer in history. Even if you try to keep up with new announcements, you can't. Why is this happening now? What's going to happen next? Is AI the biggest technology revolution in history?

Nowadays wars are not only fought with tanks, fighter jets, war ships and soldiers. Cyber has become the 5th domain in which we fight our wars and its increasingly becoming a key defense system that countries must protect against attackers. The recent war in Ukraine is the latest example of this. Cybersecurity expert speaker Mikko Hypponen will talk about the current war and the online cyber attacks that Russia is launching against Ukraine, and what it means for the country.

Defending against cyber attacks is a never-ending race. Next up, we will see fully automated malware campaigns, most likely using machine learning or generative AI. We defenders have been able to automate much of our work, enabling excellent detection, analysis and reaction times. Next up, attackers will do the same. Once the attackers migrate to automated operations, it will be a game of a robot against a robot. And then we will see that the only thing that can stop a bad AI is a good AI.

We've lived our lives in the middle of a revolution: the internet revolution. During our lifetime, all computers started talking to each other over the internet. Technology around us is changing faster than ever. We've already become dependent of our digital devices, and this is just the beginning. As connected devices open new opportunities for imagination, they also open new opportunities for online criminals. Where are we today? Where are we going? And how are we ever going to secure ten billion new devices that will be going online over the next decade?

Computer security has gone through several distinct eras. Attacks morph and change every few years. However, the biggest changes we've seen have not been technical; they've been social. It's all about the attackers and their motives. To survive, companies need to understand the risks they face. What are the criminal attackers doing today? What about the hacktivists? And why do we see more and more malware written by governments? Do terrorist groups have credible online attack capability? And what can you do to protect your network?

Data is money. The world of finance is now changing faster than ever, due to the digital revolution. Cryptocurrencies and blockchains bring us benefits but also huge problems in the shape of money laundering, online crime and rampant energy use. What's happening next? Where are we going?

Technology shapes our conflicts and crisis. Technology shapes the wars we fight. Cyber has become the 5th domain in which we fight our wars: land war, sea war, air war, space war - and now, cyberspace war. Today, all nations build cyber defences but also offensive cyber technology. We are in the beginning of the next arms race.

Our societies run on computers and software. How does a power plant in Japan trust the logic controllers they bought from a Germany, the routers they bought from China, the workstations they bought from USA and the security system they bought from Russia? It all boils down to trust. Trust. That’s a complicated concept in the internet age. Without trust, we won’t have safety. Without safety, we won’t have security. And without security, we won’t have anything at all.

Technology shapes the world. The more successful a new technology becomes, the more reliant we will become of it. This has always happened and will happen in the future too. In many ways, internet is the best and worst innovation done during our lifetime. We were all given a free and open internet, but what kind of an internet will we be leaving behind? Our global networks are being threatened by surveillance and crime. How did we get here? And where will we go next?