Mikko Hyppönen takes to the stage with relaxed confidence. His TED videos not only reveal an experienced public speaker, but one of the greatest security personas of our time. Chief research officer at F-Secure Corporation, he has been involved in some of the big cyber security events in recent history, including the takedown of the Sobig.F worm network, and is a leading expert on Stuxnet, the clandestine worm used to disable Iranian centrifuges.

Hyppönen joined F-Secure in 1991, five years after the first computer virus was created. He was already a budding security fanatic, analysing the virus’ code (and, in 2011, he starred in a mini-documentary that tracked down the original coders). Those were simpler days, when viruses were more oddity than lethal, and cyber attacks were the most exciting when they appeared in movies.