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McAfee Says He Lied About iPhone Hacking Method To Get Public Attention

Posted by timothy on from the the-greater-good dept.

blottsie writes: McAfee, who founded of one of the first companies to offer antivirus software, claimed on CNN and Russia Today, as well as in a Business Insider column, that he could bypass the advanced encryption protecting the phone without Apple's help. But he lied in these interviews, he said in an interview with the Daily Dot, to "get a shitload of public attention."

9 of 171 comments (clear)

  1. President by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    He should run for president if he is willing to lie so blatantly. Oh, looks like he already is.

    1. Re:President by supremebob · · Score: 5, Informative

      The big difference between him and most politicians is that he's willing to admit when he's lying. Someone like a Trump or a Clinton would just say that they were just being "misunderstood", or that the media "took them out of context".

  2. Re:McAffee admits he did something to get attentio by NotInHere · · Score: 5, Informative

    He is trying to get attention by being honest? That's brand new it seems.

  3. Re:Yes by Anubis+IV · · Score: 5, Informative

    Ayup. The only thing noteworthy about the earlier press was the fact that he was being taken seriously, despite pulling stunts along these lines for years. The guy wants the spotlight and yearns to be seen as relevant. That time is long-since past, if it was ever here at all.

  4. Re:So, he's a lying asshole... by bluefoxlucid · · Score: 5, Informative

    It's John McAfee. Okay, so maybe it was believable; but if you're honestly surprised by the follow-up, you haven't been paying attention. This is a guy who posted a video on Youtube where he talked about banging underaged girls and smoked a bunch of meth.

    McAfee isn't out to defraud people; he's just out to be a loud caricature. I'm sure some day he'll say something serious in a sensational and ridiculous way; I'm equally sure he'll keep saying things that sound serious and then turn out to be just noise, because that's what he does now. He doesn't get attention because people believe him; he gets attention because he's interposed himself into a situation and drawn attention to himself, and we all recognize the act. You *can* play off that act honestly, but it's not a requirement.

    --
    Support my political activism on Patreon.
  5. He can't even get the pronunciation of his own nam by HeyBob! · · Score: 4, Informative

    Mc-Afee not MAC-A-fee

  6. Re:Called it by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Congratulations! Here is your prize: A big, shiny trophy

  7. Re:Yes or No? by Trevelyan · · Score: 3, Informative

    Maybe he's got the FBI job, and the first order of business is to discredit the possibility of being able to hack into an iPhone.

    I am surprised by how accepting the /. community is of the 'fact' that he was indeed lying.


    On a less factious note: In the days when iPhones had exploitable boot loaders, one could boot a version IOS in RAM, that let you brute force the PIN as long as you wanted to without wiping the phone. On iPhone 4 it took about 29 minutes to try all 4-digit combinations from 0000 to 9999. (The default PIN length at the time)

    The only two things stopping you today from still doing this is: 1) the lack of a known vulnerability in the boot loader, thus requiring your "Special IOS" to be signed by Apple; and 2) changes to the H/W crypto chip in new models that force longer and longer time outs before you can try another PIN.
    Although retries get longer, I don't think there is any limit set, in hardware, on how many retries you can have (yet); that's still handled by IOS.

  8. Re:Yes or No? by tlambert · · Score: 4, Informative

    Therefore, a change to iOS is capable of altering the 10-strikes rule on their devices, and that's what the FBI is asking Apple to do.

    Yes. Except one thing.

    Loading a recovery image requires putting the device in *Recovery Mode*, and that's a hardware DFU mode whereby you talk to a small piece of firmware whose only job is to overwrite the Flash contents.

    It doesn't load shit into RAM and run it in order to overwrite the flash contents while preserving data: it's a *RECOVERY* mode, not an *UPDATE* mode. It's what you do as a last resort, assuming you backed your crap up to the iCloud, because if you didn't, that shit is *gone*.

    To do an *UPDATE* without overwriting the user data portion of the flash contents, you talk to the *ptpd*, which implements the DFU protocol at a higher level, in user space. How do you do that? Well, first, you have to make the ptpd willing to talk to you (or iTunes). How you you do that?

    You UNLOCK the frigging phone.

    So to load the image that the FBI wants Apple to write for them, and then to load, you'd have to unlock the phone to enable you to unlock the phone.

    Cluebat here. Knock knock knock... is that you, head? Yeah, there's two DFU implementations in the iPhone. What? You didn't know that? Well now you do. Yeah. Yeah. We can write the image you want us to write, and then we can load it onto the iPhone, but to do that, it will wipe out the very data you seek. What? No, we can't make monkeys fly out our ass... I think you are confusing us with Jim Carrey in that movie "Bruce Almighty".

    People really do not understand technology... especially technology designed to prevent exactly the type of thing the FBI wants done.