Another CEBIT 2019 keynote speaker announced

CEBIT Australia 2019 will feature computer security and privacy expert Mikko Hypponen as a keynote speaker.

The event will be held in Sydney from 29–31 October, with Hypponen as one of eight influential keynote speakers.

Hypponen is Chief Research Officer at Helsinki-based cybersecurity and privacy company F-Secure and has worked there since 1991. The company has 30 offices worldwide with more than 100,000 corporate clients and tens of millions of consumer customers.

Hypponen has written on his groundbreaking research for the New York Times, Wired and Scientific American, appears frequently on international TV and has lectured at Stanford, Oxford and Cambridge universities. He was also selected amongst the 50 most important people on the web by PCWorld magazine and was included in The FP Top 100 Global Thinkers list.

CEBIT Australia Chairperson, and former Facebook CEO ANZ, Stephen Scheeler, said CEBIT Australia is thrilled to have a keynote speaker of such a high calibre at this year’s event.

“Mikko is legendary in the global cybersecurity sphere, having assisted law enforcement in the United States, Europe and Asia for almost 30 years on computer security cases and advising government departments,” he said.

“As companies move to a much more data-centric world, cybersecurity is now more important than ever and will continue to be a growing issue, so insights from a speaker such as Mikko are invaluable.”

According to the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission (ACIC), Australia is an attractive target for serious and organised crime syndicates due to the nation’s relative wealth and high use of technology such as social media, online banking and government services. Due to the possible lucrative financial gains for serious and organised crime syndicates, the cybercrime threat is persistent. The Cyber Security Review, led by the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, found that cybercrime is costing the Australian economy up to $1 billion annually in direct costs alone.

Some of Hypponen’s greatest achievements include helping take down the Sobig Worm, a computer worm that infected millions of Microsoft Windows computers in August 2003, and Blaster Worm, which spread on computers running Windows XP and Windows 2000. He also made international news in 2011 when he tracked down and visited the authors of Brain — the first PC virus in history — and produced a documentary about it.

He has also been documenting the rise of mobile phone malware since the first smartphone viruses were found, created the blog News from the Lab — the first blog from an antivirus company, has been credited by Twitter for improving Twitter’s security and is the curator for the Malware Museum at The Internet Archive.

Image credit: ©iStockphoto.com/Andreas Kermann

Please follow us and share on Twitter and Facebook. You can also subscribe for FREE to our weekly newsletter and quarterly magazine.