John McAfee Tried to Trick Reporters Into Thinking He Hacked WhatsApp (gizmodo.com) 99
John McAfee, best known for creating McAfee security suite, apparently tried to trick journalists into believing that he is capable of breaking WhatsApp's end-to-end encryption and reading the private conversations. Gizmodo reports that McAfee tried to do so by sending journalists with compromised smartphones -- riddled with malicious tools such as keylogger. From the report: "[John McAfee was offering to a different couple of news organizations to mail them some phones, have people show up, and then demonstrate with those two phones that [McAfee] in a remote location would be able to read the message as it was sent across the phones," cybersecurity expert Dan Guido, who was contacted by a reporter trying to verify McAfee's claims said. "I advised the reporter to go out and buy their own phones, because even though they come in a box it's very easy to get some saran wrap and a hair dryer to rebox them."
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Remind me again - why the fuck do we need Unicode for a fucking apostrophe and why can't asshats accept the superior straight ' instead of the ugly angled "smart quote" style abominations?
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It's one of the increasingly-many "features" I have to kill off in the Office suite. But, ideally, your application shouldn't be crashing when encountering malformed data. Realistically though the easier solution is to prevent the bad data from getting in. Why not replace any inserted data with an ASCII equivalent? Map common characters to sane characters, and replace anything not explicitly handled with a question mark, or simply remove it. Run this as a trigger on INSERT and UPDATE. As an added bonu
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Seems this could be a very simple input filter when a story is submitted. Could even generate a warning and shit.
Feeding the hand that feeds you (Score:1, Funny)
But where? (Score:1)
Gizmodo reports that McAfee tried to do so by sending journalists with compromised smartphones
But where did he send them?
Re:But where? (Score:5, Funny)
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Gizmodo reports that McAfee tried to do so by sending journalists with compromised smartphones -- riddled with malicious tools such as keylogger. From the report:
"to a different couple of news organizations" is in a completely different sentence. Either the sentence as written is missing a direct object, or we got an extraneous "with" lodged in there somehow.
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To be whooshed there had to have been a joke.
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Don't you ever wonder why your friends are laughing and you just don't understand?
Not really.
It's true, Aspies don't recognize sarcasm
Ah, the good old Internet standby of calling anyone who disagrees with you illiteral/mentally ill. So what mental disorder causes you to be rude to everyone you meet online?
have poor social skills.
Not projecting at all...
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Ah, the good old Internet standby of calling anyone who disagrees with you illiteral/mentally ill. So what mental disorder causes you to be rude to everyone you meet online?
Whoa there cowboy - Asperger's is not in any way shape or form mentally ill.
They are differently abled, and some of those abilities are magnitudes more proficient that "normal" people.
And normal ain't all that anyhow.
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Aspergers is in the DSM under Autism Spectrum Disorders. What would you call it? If it isn't a mental illness, than what is a mental illness?
Coming from someone who has this disorder...
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Aspergers is in the DSM under Autism Spectrum Disorders. What would you call it? If it isn't a mental illness, than what is a mental illness?
Coming from someone who has this disorder...
If you want to call yourself mentlly ill, have at it. I've worked with and was friends with a number of Engineers who were Aspies". They weren't social butterflies. But they were good engineers. They lived, ate and breathed with us, just like everyone else, they didn't commit crimes. About the worst was there was a level a level of curiousity and concern about their difference. I refuse to call a highly competent and focused person as mentally ill. Differently and sometimes superiorly abled is what I wou
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Wow, 3 whole posts and already #31 on his foe list. I never knew it was so easy.
Good for press (Score:2)
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I used McAfee in the past, but I believe that was after John and the company parted.
John left the company in 1994.
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I used McAfee in the past, but I believe that was after John and the company parted.
John left the company in 1994.
John left reality about the same time
Re: Good for press (Score:1)
McCafee is the Donald Trump of Infosec. Always amusing to read about but proof that some things just don't react well with Cocaine
Con-Man (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems like he's trying to be a con-man, and doing a real bad job of it. I'm not sure if any of that is intentional, or it's just the voices in his head making him do asinine things.
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That's what happens after taking bath salts.
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It seems like he's trying to be a con-man, and doing a real bad job of it.
the truth is we don't know what he was trying to do. maybe he was trying to point out that the media isn't tech savvy and it blew up in his face or maybe he did it for the lulz, we really don't know. the only thing we do know is that he's not a credible source of information.
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It seems to me that he was trying to show how easy it is to social engineer a defeat to security or the appearance of security.
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He successfully tricked them into thinking he's a Presidential candidate.
So did Trump, but he actually got his party's nomination. I can't imagine McAfee being nominated by the Libertarian Party.
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He successfully tricked them into thinking he's a Presidential candidate.
So did Trump, but he actually got his party's nomination. I can't imagine McAfee being nominated by the Libertarian Party.
That's what we said about Trump!
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So did Trump, but he actually got his party's nomination. I can't imagine McAfee being nominated by the Libertarian Party.
He won't. Gary Johnson has a pretty commanding lead. Still, even if he did, I'd vote for him before Clinton or Trump, because no matter how crazy he is, he's still better than either of them.
Re: Con-Man (Score:1)
I agree that Gibson is more like a tabloid in security business but he did one thing good, he made ordinary people aware of the risks involved when they wonder around with open ports exposed to the internet. I believe the language he uses with all that sensational terms somehow made Joe Public install a free firewall to his Windows machine, that is a good thing.
He also made people, ordinary non technical people aware of spyware.
He claims some crazy things that is a fact and we all laugh when someone codes a
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Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
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I imagine them getting into trouble every edition, with Steve Wozniak secretly swooping in, saving the day, and rescuing them each time. They would, of course, believe that they were the true heroes.
Captain's log : Stardate 4351.5 (Score:2)
-- Kara, frustrated by the constant inquiries about Spock's APP
Sounds familiar (Score:5, Insightful)
McAfee Says He Lied About iPhone Hacking Method To Get Public Attention
https://apple.slashdot.org/sto... [slashdot.org]
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Fortunately the apologetic flowers he sends the widow every year are black, so Bill is more confused than suspicious.
it worked (Score:2)
Here is a screenshot in case they realize their mistake and remove it later [imgur.com].
Re:it worked (Score:5, Insightful)
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Exactly! Someone should hire him to consult about some technology issue, and make a reality tv series about it. You might not even have to tell him you're doing it!
"All the cameras? Well, Mr. McAfee we take security very seriously here at Setec Astronomy."
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. Now the real question is if physical possession of the device is a requirement for installing the keylogger, (in which case not a very high level risk), or if it can be loaded through via malicious website, (much higher level of risk). Unfortunately the article doesn't go into enough detail
I don't know how he did it, but if you have ADB access, you can install a key-logger (I used to do that for my job). Another option is rooting a phone, install the key-logger, then unroot it.
Grammar Much? (Score:2)
Did someone a word here? What is this trying to say?
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offering to a different couple of news organizations to mail them
I RTFA, and this is an accurate quote. The grammar in article is as bad as the grammar in the summary.
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Failure Abounds (Score:4, Insightful)
John McAfee is doing everything he can to and and be relevant in today's society, apart from actually creating anything and doing something productive.
* He is a failed Libertarian candidate for President
* He failed to decrypt iPhones for the FBI although he said he can do it.
* He failed in decrypting whatsapp.
* The software he originally wrote is a failed idea. (Who ever thought A/V signatures were a good idea other than a mad man.)
It is too bad he could not move back to South America since he is now a known fraud and dog killer.
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(Who ever thought A/V signatures were a good idea other than a mad man.)
I guess the question is who is the madder, the person with that good idea, or the people who kept buying it and the people who bought out the concept making the original mad man pretty wealthy.
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* He is a failed Libertarian candidate for President
He's one of several people running for the Libertarian nomination, he is not the candidate. The LP has not had its convention yet this year so hasn't picked a candidate yet.
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That's not how non-reversible math/encryption works.
Computers are machines. Machines follow instructions. Nothing magical happens. If you have access to the machine you can read the instructions the machine is reading and better yet, you can get it to follow your own instructions. You don't have to brute force the strongly encrypted key if you can brute force the weak password. If you're watching the conversation the phone is having with itself, at some point it has to decide if the password you fed it was good or not. And then you've got the key. The proof
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Shit, at least he could do that and we could get some entertainment out of him.
Signatures WERE a good idea with 286 CPU, 512K RAM (Score:5, Insightful)
> Who ever thought A/V signatures were a good idea other than a mad man.
They WERE a good idea. He did that in 1987. Intel was selling a lot of 286 processors. The same year IBM announced their first 386 computer, the PS/2, which came with half a MB of RAM and supported of to 4MB if you maxed out the upgrades.
A year earlier the first virus for PC compatibles had come out, called Brain. By 1987 there were several viruses, perhaps a dozen or more. Nothing that caused destruction over a network, though, that wouldn't happen until year-end.
If you're trying to identify a dozen or so programs, and you have maybe 2KB to spare, a simple lookup table of signatures seems like a pretty good way to do it.
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Al-Queda Calls for the Execution of John McAfee (Score:5, Funny)
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I can almost see their collective hands rubbing together in front of goatee'd pointy faces...
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The problem here is... (Score:1)
Huh? (Score:2)
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I *think* they are saying he sent compromised phones for them to use.
Which is totally legit, hacking the end user is easier than hacking the technology, and often more effective.
First line of the summary needs some work (Score:1)
John McAfee, best known for being a crazy drug addict
FTFY. McAfee's not best known for antivirus, he's best known for the crazy things he's done with the money he made making antivirus software.
Distraction (Score:1)
Distraction from the fact that he was suspected of murder
saran wrap (Score:3)
saran wrap?
Do people really seek a specific brand of plastic wrap?
The best brand of plastic wrap, of course, is Cling-On brand plastic wrap.
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At this point, I have to wonder (Score:2)
Did McAfee really write that anti-virus software? Or was it written by a Bangkok prostitute?
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McAfee is a fuck-up (Score:3)
McAfee should suffer death by a million bee stings. He is an attention whore who deserves the worst the Universe has ever seen.