John McAfee: “I'll decrypt the San Bernardino phone free of charge”

businessinsider.com

28 points·aaossa··5 comments

>And why do the best hackers on the planet not work for the FBI? Because the FBI will not hire anyone with a 24-inch purple mohawk, 10-gauge ear piercings, and a tattooed face who demands to smoke weed while working and won't work for less than a half-million dollars a year. But you bet your ass that the Chinese and Russians are hiring similar people with similar demands and have been for many years. It's why we are decades behind in the cyber race.

Then the next photo they show is a bunch of people with short hair, except the one guy with a ponytail, no hair dyes, no piercings (that I can tell at least), and no visible tattoos.

I can't help that they did that to make him look foolish. Some would argue he doesn't need the help, but I think he simply likes hyperbole to exaggerate his points.

That being said - pointless offer. FBI wouldn't risk losing the data. Always a joy to see what crazy things McAfee is shouting about. He's an interesting character at the least.

I can't imagine there isn't some way you could smash the memory on an iPhone to disable the lockout (I mean, all you have to do is keep the counter from going down, this is just like cheating in a video game.) If you don't want to enter all the codes by hand you should be able to mess up the digitizer somehow.

If you were willing to sacrifice 10 or so phones this wouldn't be hard at all, you could pay $10,000 to a few different e-lancers, one of them would succeed...

He'll decrypt the iPhone with social engineering?

How do you social engineer a dead guy to unlock his phone?

Maybe you socially engineer Apple to get the iOS keys? (I don't think that will work)

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