John McAfee: ‘I Can Guarantee You, It Was Not the Russians’ (Kim dot Com agrees)

originally posted by: ketsuko
a reply to: jimmyx

... even though they were never allowed to directly examine the evidence themselves?

Why do you think THEY have all the details?

they know a hell of a lot more than mcafee about the Russian hack.....i'll take their word over his, any day of the weak. he retired in 1997 from Mcafee and the company was sold to Intel...he has worked in other web security companies since then, (go read his bio), but as far as knowing the full scope of what the intel agencies know, he doesn't know, period. as far as "intelligence", there is a lot more to it than "lines of code"

originally posted by: TheWisestCumbrian
Personally I don't believe your election was hacked. A bit of disinfo knocked about but it's nothing new.

Mr Dotcom and McAfee though, are pretty poor sources. I would trust any of you guys more, as it would at least reflect your opinion. These fellas have various reasons to hold a multitude of positions.

Just my 2 pence.

I can't speak for mcaffee but Kim dot com should never ever ever ever ever be used as a source. Other than for news on Kim dot com. An even then, it's a stretch.

a reply to: CriticalStinker

I think he actually said that they were lying about not being able to get into it. That they probably did then locked it after which was also Apples argument

a reply to: jimmyx

If they really knew so much about hacking and preventing it, you would have thought they would have taken steps to prevent it after the Chinese hacked into our personnel databases and stole all that information on our people, including deep cover operatives toward the earlier parts of Obama's tenure.

It made us pull some of our deep cover agents because the info exposed them.

And yet, now all of a sudden this is a problem and we still can't prevent it.

How much do they know about it all really?

a reply to: theantediluvian

From your source...

No drugs were found, and the entrepreneur was not charged.

originally posted by: CriticalStinker


But the owner, creator and top minds of one of the largest security software companies is unhinged so dismissed.

His company literally has to determine the biggest threats across the world, but he's "unhinged" so he's dismissed.

While i happen to agree with him, John McAfee hasn't been involved with this company in over 20 years.

The company was founded in 1987 as McAfee Associates, named for its founder John McAfee, who resigned from the company in 1994.

On January 6, 2014, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich announced during the Consumer Electronics Show the name change from McAfee Security to Intel Security. The company's red shield logo will remain and the firm will continue to operate as a wholly owned Intel subsidiary.[12] John McAfee, who no longer has any interest in the company, expressed his pleasure at his name no longer being associated with the software. "I am now everlastingly grateful to Intel for freeing me from this terrible association with the worst software on the planet. These are not my words, but the words of millions of irate users."[13] However, as of 2016 the products still bear the name McAfee.

Wikipedia

McAfee is certainly an eccentric guy but none of the truly reprehensible things attached to him have stuck. He's without a doubt someone you should pay attention to if he's weighing in on cyber-security. There are a lot of his interviews on YouTube worth checking out.

originally posted by: IgnoranceIsntBlisss
a reply to: theantediluvian

So now using an MDMA analog means someone is discredited?

Whose scraping the bottom of the barrel now?

Yeah that's what I said. How about trying to be intellectually honest? Unlike RT or the OP? Years of hiding out in Belize playing guinea pig to his own amateur mad scientist self and insufflating massive quantities of MDPV?

Do you know any long term users of MDPV or similar compounds? It's hardly an MDMA analog but I appreciate you saying so to try to make it sound like the man is a casual user of Ecstasy. I know two people who experienced similar psychotic breaks including "gang stalking" and messianic delusions. If you want, I will U2U a link to self-published "books" by one of them and you can give me your honest opinion about how well his brain functions. The other was thankfully committed for month or so and given large doses of antipsychotics. She fortunately was able to regain her sanity but even then it took months for the "feelings" produced by her former delusions to subside.

McAfee is a notorious f'ing flake. He hasn't been in the industry in decades. Identifying him as "Developer, McAfee Antivirus" is technically true by highly misleading. He hasn't been with the company he founded in 23 years and it wasn't like he was writing code prior to his exit.

Nothing he ever did has any direct bearing on any McAfee product. Period. There are millions of people in the world far more qualified to speak on the topic than John McAfee.

Alperovitch on the other hand is eminently qualified and you want to dismiss him because Google's venture capital arm invested in CrowdStrike. Maybe I should post a collected of a couple dozen links about McAfee and drop the mic? Spare me the admonishments about ad hominems please?

a reply to: theantediluvian

Do you know any long term users of MDPV or similar compounds? It's hardly an MDMA analog but I appreciate you saying so to try to make it sound like the man is a casual user of Ecstasy.

I myself have taken pure MDMA and some of its analogs at least hundreds of times throughout my life and I feel fine. I can also attest for dozens of other people in my life who have safely experimented with recreational drugs and who have not had to deal with psychotic breaks, changes in behavior, brain damage, etc.

There is actually a ton of science behind the clinical and medicinal value of MDMA.

But none of that is important here because all you're doing is Ad Hominem'ing McAfee instead of actually addressing his argument.

Dodge & deflect. Smoke & mirrors.

originally posted by: rickymouse
I agree with McAfee, this does not look like a Russian government hack. It looks more like someone was trying to steer us to look at Russia.

Lets see, a The Burn supporter high up in the DNC sees what was happening to him as he was getting rolled behind the scene. As Bernie gain momentum the DNC worked hard to derail it so Hillary would be their pick no mater what. That DNC official leaks the info and so hackers were then used, maybe Russian based, maybe half a dozen of any other, but all just a tool.

The emails are leaked, they are true, the DNC base is pissed off to say the least, Trump wins.... end of story, or is it...

The Dems lost big so what do they do? 2020 baby!!!!! First lets make Trump's victory look illegitimate by first suggesting voter fraud, millions spent and nothing there. Lets say that Hillary really won since she got 5 million more vote in CA and so got the overall popular vote... that didn't pan out so well either. Well the last thing they can do is suggest Trump and the Russians worked hand in hand, and so you say "someone" and we now all know who that someone is, don't we?

a reply to: Xtrozero

Boy, the democratic party is ruthless at trying to slander the republican president. I hope the Democratic congressmen do not get too wrapped up in this grudge that Hillary supporters are firing up. There are a lot of good Democratic congressmen out there. Being that the electoral college pretty much followed normal procedure is a good sign. It almost appears Obama is actually trying to fire things up before he leaves office. He is ruining his legacy. He is not acting wise, he may ruin it for any black Americans who try to run for president. Maybe a good woman will run for president, not Michelle though, that would just be a continuance of Obama politics.

a reply to: sad_eyed_lady

John McAfee is a fraud and a lunatic..Just a sampling

In February 2016 McAfee received media attention by publicly volunteering to decrypt the iPhone used by the San Bernardino shooters, avoiding the need for Apple to build a backdoor.

McAfee later admitted that these claims were a publicity stunt.

In May 2016, McAfee was appointed Chief Executive Chairman and CEO of MGT Capital Investments. The company announced that it will be renamed John McAfee Global Technologies.

During this time, McAfee claimed that he and his team had exploited a flaw in the Android operating system that allowed him to read encrypted messages from WhatsApp.

Gizmodo investigated these claims and reported that McAfee had sent reporters malware-infected phones to make this hack work.

en.wikipedia.org...

originally posted by: IgnoranceIsntBlisss
a reply to: theantediluvian

So now that you got your pure Ad hominem attack out of your system?, are you going to deal with what he actually said???

Sure thing. Somebody has help you deny the ignorance you're so keen to embrace my friend!

First and foremost, the report that he refers to, Grizzly Steppe, is the 13-page JAR that is basically just an advisory. It does not even mention the "four points" that McAfee mentions. At all. Follow the link. Read it yourself. Stop taking insane people dragged in front of a camera by RT at their word.

So off the bat he's making a straw man argument by misrepresenting what is being used as evidence as being "the only" evidence when it's only a small fraction, mischaracterizing the nature of the evidence he does address and conflating its origins with the investigation.

To remind you, here are the four points he mentions:

#1 Russian language in implants
#2 Cyrillic keyboard used
#3 Compiler dates and timestamps are Russian
#4 IP addresses point to Russia

Much of what he touches on constitutes only a portion of the threads of evidence used by FireEye (not the FBI, NSA, CIA or Homeland Security) to identify APT28 (aka Fancy Bear) as Russian state-sponsored hackers back in 2014 and drawing on forensic evidence obtained starting in 2007 (through 2013). I've posted the link to the executive summary detailing this a number of times but I'll do it again here:

APT28: A Window into Russia's Cyber Espionage Operations?

The section you'll want to see starts on page 25.

Use of Russian and English Language Settings in PE Resources

PE resources include language information that can be helpful if a developer wants to show user interface items in a specific language. 25 Non-default language settings packaged with PE resources are dependent on the developer’s build environment. Each PE resource includes a “locale” identifier with a language ID “composed of a primary language identifier indicating the language and a sublanguage identifier indicating the country/region.” 26

At the time of the writing of this paper, we had identified 103 malware samples that were both attributed to APT28 and contained PE resources. Table 5 shows the locale identifiers 27 with associated language and country/region for these samples.

PE = Portable Executable. Essentially what is being referenced are embedded or otherwise included resources (typically standard resources like GUI components) included at compile. The 103 samples considered were from Dec 2007 through Dec 2013. Of those, they counted 59 Russian locales, 27 US English, 1 UK English and 16 neutral.

If you want to read a little more about the topic:

KoreLogic Security Blog: Using Windows Resource Language Codes for Attribution

RSA: Identifying the country of origin for a malware PE executable

Next up, compile times:

Compile Times Align with Working Hours in Moscow and St. Petersburg

Of the 140 malware samples that we have attributed to APT28 so far, over 89% were compiled between 0400 and 1400 UTC time, as depicted in Figure 10. Over 96% were compiled between Monday and Friday. This parallels the working hours in UTC+0400 (that is, compile times begin about 8AM and end about 6PM in this time zone). This time zone includes major Russian cities such as Moscow and St. Petersburg.

Neither of those is conclusive on their own obviously and they could be faked but we'd be talking about a decade of somebody faking all these little crumbs of forensic evidence to masquerade as Russian state-sponsored hackers, hacking hundreds of targets of interest to the Russian government, some of them particularly and almost exclusively to the Russian government.

A large part of FireEye's identification in that report (which is again from 2014 and lacks the further substantiation from the last two years) focuses on the targets of the group. Also, keep in mind FireEye is only one of the teams who has identified APT28 as Russian using various threads of evidence and that this identification of APT28 isn't something conveniently created in the last six months for the frickin' election.

How much time do you think I should dedicate to refuting off the wall claims by off the wall McAfee presented by Russian state propaganda outlets because people are driven by their love of Trump and fear of even the whiff of illegitimacy that they're clamoring for any dubious source or spurious claim to prop up their willful ignorance?

At what point do you take an objective look at some of the available evidence instead of trying to refute the low hanging fruit of tiny snatches of information published in mainstream media geared for the tech-ignorant lowest common denominator?

I can spend 2 hours writing up a thread going over parts of it and have a the angry mob of deniers come in and call me names, have you post a bunch of pictures of Syria to derail my thread and end up wasting my time. Meanwhile, people who don't know anything can post Russian propaganda by way of a drug-addled has-been in a disgusting display of the blind leading the blind and a bunch of none-the-wiser posters will pat eachother on the back believing they their purely political-agenda-driven denialism has been vindicated.

To hell with it. Wallow in your ignorance. Apparently it's blissful.

a reply to: ColdWisdom

Uh what? After that massive comprehension failure I think you might want to reconsider whether or not you've suffered any cogntiive impairment from your years of experimentation afer all.

The only person who brought MDMA into the conversaton was IIB who was trying to conflate MDMA with MDPV because he wrongly assumed that MDPV was either the start or end of McAfee's flakiness and that simply calling MDPV an MDMA analog would somehow make them basically the same thing.

What he was doing wasn't too far off from implying that Meth and MDMA are "ya know, basically the same thing."

But hey, you rush right out and shove a bunch of MDPV up your nose and then come back here and tell us how closely MDPV's effects mimic those of MDMA. Lmao.

Stop being a reactionary and read what I actually said.

a reply to: theantediluvian

Okay, so you're more intelligent, and wise in the field of cyber-security, than John McAffee. And that would be pre and post him getting into mind expanding drugs.



And there's no way that KGB grade hackers couldn't pull it off without covering their tracks. And no way anybody could stage such a thing to make it point in their direction.

You're also an expert on exotic mind expanding drugs too.

Anything I've missed? Perhaps you've been working on a cure for cancer in your spare time? Is your solution to the world hunger problem ready to be unveiled yet?

It's funny you just told him "Stop being a reactionary and read what I actually said", while his was a response to you going ad hominem hail mary from the kickoff in conflating dude as being a deranged mindless drug fiend, instead of deal with what he had said.

Of course the best part is, it doesn't prove that they're the source of the WikiLeaks, nor that the WikiLeaks truly cost Hillary the election. Or that it even played out as something like it being more relevant in the eventual outcome than se the widespread backlash to SJW'ism, or perhaps the Paid Riot Squads, et al etc.

It seems to me you'd do yourself more solid in building a huge case of just how much fake news from Russian sources there actually was, and how effective it might have been than this 7 degrees of Kevin Bacon shell game you guys are playing regarding the hacks (which we all know you, The Hacker, you'd have been ALL OVER the junk if it were RNC emails spread all across the web exposing corruption etc galore).

a reply to: theantediluvian

Uh what? After that massive comprehension failure I think you might want to reconsider whether or not you've suffered any cogntiive impairment from your years of experimentation afer all.

Well, of course you would say that.

What he was doing wasn't too far off from implying that Meth and MDMA are "ya know, basically the same thing."

They're not. An elementary understanding of organic chemistry would reveal that the compound MDMA (methylinedioxymethamphetamine) is uniquely different than methamphetamine hydrochloride. They're similar but they're not 'basically the same thing' and not even close.

Ad Hom, though. You attack McAfee personally by trying to label him as a drug user, rather than rebuke his argument.

ince the stakes are so high, thermonuclear war and all, the least the CIA and other wonderful intelligence agencies can do is provide sufficient evidence to the American people before they get annihilated under the winds of a 10,000 degree winter breeze

Don't count on it.

Fbi Deletes details about hacking effort.

Keep the Russian blaim coming. Maybe it'll shelter some of the tears of hilldog supporters.

May relieve some grief for them. Maybe not. But after the tears are wiped... Trump still won, and is their President.

originally posted by: IgnoranceIsntBlisss
a reply to: theantediluvian

Okay, so you're more intelligent, and wise in the field of cyber-security, than John McAffee.

AGAIN..John McAfree made gobs of money over a decade ago..moved to belize and did insane drugs in the jungle for years...returned tot he states and has repeatedly gotten caught in scams and frauds..

the last time he worked in Cyber Security was over 20 years ago..

He's nutcase..And most High School geeks know more about cyber security than McAfree...He was at the right time in the right place 20+ years ago..

a reply to: Indigo5

I checked his wikipedia last night after the thread got going.
en.wikipedia.org...

Scams?

What I see is the resume of an off the cuff renaissance man, while liberals calling non-liberals things like "nutcases" is about as common as bacteria is on a shoe, or inother terms, as common as player haters whom support the DNC.

a reply to: IgnoranceIsntBlisss

Okay, so you're more intelligent, and wise in the field of cyber-security, than John McAffee. And that would be pre and post him getting into mind expanding drugs.

You're also an expert on exotic mind expanding drugs too.

Anything I've missed? Perhaps you've been working on a cure for cancer in your spare time? Is your solution to the world hunger problem ready to be unveiled yet?

McAfee was relevant 20-something years ago. MDPV is about as mind expanding as Crack and not particularly exotic but I find it hilarious that you're so desperate to keep hope alive in this stupid McAfee interview that you're now referring to one of the most popular "bath salts" as "exotic" and "mind expanding." Lmao!

As for my expertise? I taught myself to program (QBasic) at 13. At the age of 14, I made my first and only piece of malware, a trojan "trace jammer" that dumped a block of ASM to a file and used system calls to assemble and execute the malicious payload with MS-DOS's debug. I was phishing accounts on IRC before I entered high school. By 15-16, I had taught myself UNIX socket programming in C and was making my own rudimentary pseudo-rootkits (nothing too fancy, mostly just binary wrappers, log cleaners etc). I've sinced learned 5 additional languages to varying degrees.

How many boxes have you hacked again? I personally hacked hundreds before I was out of highschool. I'm currently an IT director and architect/chief dev of a warehouse management system. I've done UNIX and Windows Server administration, network administration and been a de facto database admin (and email admin — Exchange — but that's no great accomplishment). I'm highly experienced with virtualization (particularly Citrix XenServer these days). This week I'll be onsite installing a new rack filled with PowerEdge servers for our new Xen pool and a forklift upgrade of our SAN.

Outside of my actual job, my latest projects include my news aggregator of course and two crypto gaming sites.

Oh, and I can fix about 1000 Outlook issues. Plus few people can claim to have said "did you try rebooting?" more than me.

If you know anything about folks like me, you already know we're pretty much all recreational drug experts.