Mikko Hypponen

It's been a bit sad to see that out of Linux distributions, it was Android - the most successful mobile Linux distribution - that has really introduced the malware problem to the Linux world.

We want to detect malware, regardless of its source or purpose. Politics don't even enter the discussion, nor should they. Any malware, even targeted, can get out of hand and cause 'collateral damage' to machines that aren't the intended victim.

Foreigners like me have no privacy rights whatsoever. Yet we keep using U.S.-based services all the time, making us a legal target for gathering and storing our private information. Other countries do surveillance as well. But nobody has the global visibility that United States does.

U.S. intelligence has the legal right to monitor foreign communications as they go through to U.S. service providers. However, even though something is legal doesn't make it right. I'm not American; I don't really care about what data is being collected about American citizens. I'm worried about us, the foreigners.

Stuxnet, Duqu and Flame are not normal, everyday malware, of course. All three of them were most likely developed by a Western intelligence agency as part of covert operations that weren't meant to be discovered. The fact that the malware evaded detection proves how well the attackers did their job.

The United States has an unfair advantage, as most of the popular cloud services, search engines, computer and mobile operating systems or web browsers are made by U.S. companies. When the rest of the world uses the net, they are effectively using U.S.-based services, making them a legal target for U.S. intelligence.