Interview with Mikko Hypponen

I spend my keynotes speaking about the changing landscape, like where we are today. We have big risks ahead of us and all companies today are software companies. So we have to be aware of the risks and especially understand the different kinds of hackers out there. So I gave some case studies of recent hacks and why people were doing it and how much money they made out of it and had some ideas to organizations on how to better defend yourself. And it all starts from understanding the attackers. That's really interesting and it must be a terrifying landscape to operate in for some people. What will be the major challenges for people working within that field and working to protect themselves against such things in the next year? We need to be able to do better security engineering and to do better security engineering you need security engineers. And that is one of the main challenges. Where do you find the people with these skills? There's not enough. There are a lot of computer science students coming out of the universities who are specializing in security and we have a clear lack of expertise in this field. And there's a couple of things that comes out of that. One seems to be that companies which are unable to find the talent, then they have to outsource their security. And this might sound scary, like you're outsourcing security, which is crucial to your operations, but it's not actually that different from real world security. Most organizations don't have their own guards guarding the headquarters. Most have outsourced it to security companies like guarding companies. And exactly the same way you can outsource your online security and computer security to relevant companies which specialize in doing this. That's a great tip. So as we're here at NextM, I also wanted to ask you a little, what do you view as the three major things that marketeers need to be aware of within the tech space in the next year? The big trends are easy to say. IOT, robotics, AI. I think pretty much everybody would see those as the big major trends in 2017. But there's the other technologies bubbling under which are very interesting. Especially I'd like to mention blockchain. Not bitcoin, not cryptocurrencies, blockchain. Because blockchain is really the innovation which made things like bitcoin possible, but it doesn't have to be around money at all, or currencies, or wealth. Blockchain is a very powerful idea. It's actually a very simple idea, but a very powerful idea. That's how you know an idea is good. That it's very obvious once somebody invented it. But it wasn't obvious until somebody invented it. And blockchain is simply a public ledger of transactions which can never be changed. And this can be used in many, many ways. Just last month I saw a really interesting application from a car company who wants to fight auto meter fraud. Like when you buy a used car, some dealerships roll back the number so you don't see how much the car has actually been used for. And they actually have the cars report the numbers regularly to a blockchain. A public blockchain where the numbers are locked in place forever. You can never change them. It's a perfect way of solving a problem. And there's so many similar things that can be solved with this new technology. And that's very exciting.