Cybersecurity legend offers to decrypt shooter's iPhone

Feb 18, 2016 22:37 GMT  ·  By

In an op-ed for Business Insider, cybersecurity legend, McAfee Security founder, and US presidential candidate John McAfee has pledged his support for Apple's cause and offered to break the San Bernadino's shooter iPhone for free.

The Internet has been invaded in the past week with news of the legal dispute between the FBI and Apple after a US judge cited a 227-year-old law and ordered Apple to decrypt the San Bernardino shooter's iPhone.

Apple's CEO decided this wasn't in the best interest of his company, and penned an open letter to the FBI, saying they'll fight the judge's order in court.

Since the issue went much deeper and was about the government's need and obsession for having a backdoor inside encrypted services and products, companies like Google and Microsoft rallied behind Apple, offering their support.

Of course, there were also people that backed the FBI, like Donald Trump for example, but the majority of voices you'll hear online are supporting Apple's cause, and for a good reason: encryption backdoors are bad, mmmkay!

John McAfee to the rescue!

The latest person to voice his opinion is the infamous John McAfee, also a US presidential candidate, just like Mr. Trump. Unlike The Donald, Mr. McAfee took Apple's side, but not because he has a particular love for the company, but because of his cybersecurity education that has taught him that backdoors, of any kind, are actually a door left wide open.

"So here is my offer to the FBI. I will, free of charge, decrypt the information on the San Bernardino phone, with my team," wrote Mr. McAfee in BusinessInsider. "We will primarily use social engineering, and it will take us three weeks. If you accept my offer, then you will not need to ask Apple to place a back door [sic] in its product, which will be the beginning of the end of America."

Mr. McAfee is so confident that his team of hackers is so good that he also added, "I would eat my shoe on the Neil Cavuto show if we could not break the encryption on the San Bernardino phone."

In the rest of the piece, Mr. McAfee joins the ranks of other infosec experts that have been writing about the downside of encryption backdoors for the past year, saying that if the US government would force companies to such a thing, it would almost guarantee that America would lose in any cyber conflict, ever.