At TrustyCon, Hypponen Says What He Won't at RSA

RSA isn’t the only computer security conference in San Francisco this week.

On Thursday morning, Mikko Hypponen spoke to a crowd in a movie theater in downtown San Francisco, just around the corner from the RSA security conference. Hypponen, the chief research officer at Finnish security software company F-Secure, was originally scheduled to speak this week at RSA, as he’s done eight times since 2004. But he decided to boycott the conference after Reuters reported in December that the U.S. National Security Agency had a secret $10 million contract with RSA, the computer security company behind the conference, under which RSA added a faulty encryption algorithm created by the NSA to one of its computer security products in order to allow the agency to break such encryption when needed.