McAfee Employee/Hacker to Go to Jail

Brett Oliphant, a security researcher who worked for ScanAlert, has been charged with fraud and may spend several years in prison. Oliphant was the vice president of security services of ScanAlert and joined McAfee once the company was acquired by the Santa Clara-based firm. Brett and his brother Bryan "are accused of the fraudulent sale of unregistered securities and of wrongfully receiving more than $1,215,000 from the sale of unregistered securities," it is explained in a press release published on the Indiana Secretary of State Todd Rokita website in December, last year.

It's interesting to note that the two brothers have been charged back in December 2007, but nobody noticed that one of the scammers was actually a McAfee security researcher. Now, here's something more interesting: according to various reports, Brett Oliphant joined McAfee in February, which means he became a member of the security team approximately two or three months after the fraud charges had been announced.

The Register informs that if found guilty, the security researcher may spend his next 32 years behind bars but it seems like Brett Oliphant considers he's not guilty. However, blogger Ronald van den Heetkamp got a tip that Brett is the one who set up the fraud schemes in which he also lured his brother Bryan. "I got an e-mail from someone who knew the brothers, and Brett also seems to have tricked his brother Bryan into his little fraud schemes," the blogger wrote in a new post.

At the time of writing this article, there's no official statement coming from McAfee. However, according to The Register, some measures have been taken as the biography belonging to Brett Oliphant has been removed from the website, but several cache versions are still available on the web.

"Brett is a widely recognized expert in computer security. He has published numerous papers in the areas of network based vulnerability detection, false positive mitigation and remediation strategies, as well as numerous vulnerability research articles," one of these websites reads.