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EXTRA EP UNSAFE

By MIT Technology Review. 

cyberdid.medium.com

10 min

June 28, 2021

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EXTRA EP UNSAFE

The Crazy Life of Former Fugitive and Eccentric Cybersecurity Legend John McAfee

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John McAfee is an enigma.

He created one of the largest antivirus companies today, and yet it is what happened after this chapter of his life that made him a legend.

John McAfee is a cybersecurity pioneer, millionaire, and crypto enthusiast. Having started his career half a century ago, he until recently excited the public with his antics and the markets with his bold forecasts. What motivated this difficult man? Nonconformism, greed, ambition, thirst for attention, paranoia? We'll go through McAfee's colorful track record, and you can draw your own conclusions.

Let's remember everything as it was. McAfee once lived in Belize and was allegedly involved in drugs and other illegal activities, but that's half the story. Look at who this man once was, who he has become and where he is now.

Believe me, this is a wild adventure.

John McAfee was born in Great Britain in the mid-1940s. His parents moved to Roanoke, Virginia when he was young.

His early life was probably difficult for a young man.

His father, a surveyor, was an alcoholic. When McAfee was 15, his father committed suicide, and McAfee says he wakes up every day.

Source: Wired

McAfee went to Roanoke College, where he also began drinking.

But the younger McAfee was a shrewd entrepreneur at a young age. His first business was selling magazines door to door, which he says made him a small fortune.

Source: Wired

He started working for a company that programmed punched cards in the late 60s.

This taught him the basics of early computing. Using this information, he took a job with the Missouri Pacific Railroad, where he helped the company use IBM's newfangled computer system to calibrate train schedules.

While at the Missouri Pacific Railroad, he began using harder drugs.

According to Wired, he went to work many days stumbling on LSD. One day he was sold a packet of a psychedelic drug known as DMT. According to Wired, McAfee snorted, felt nothing, and then decided to go through with the whole package. Then all hell broke loose. He got scared, ran out into the street and hid behind a trash can.

Wired writes :

People asked him questions, but he did not understand what they were talking about. The computer gave a schedule of trains to the Moon; he couldn't understand it. He found himself behind a trash can in downtown St. Louis, hearing voices and desperately hoping no one would look at him. He never returned to Missouri Pacific. Part of him believes that he's still on this trip, that everything since then has been one giant hallucination, and that one day he'll snap out of it and find himself back on his couch in St. Louis listening to Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon. .

McAfee moved to Silicon Valley in the 1970s.

He worked for various technology companies (including the NASA Space Research Institute) while abusing drugs and alcohol. It wasn't until 1983 that he sobered up. According to Wired, he worked at Omex and found his daily routine to be snorting cocaine at his desk and drinking a bottle of whiskey. He says he felt alone and scared and finally decided to get help.

Source: NBC, San Diego , Wired.

In the 1980s, McAfee worked for Lockheed.

At that time, computers were still relatively new. In 1986, the first computer virus hit computers. He read about these new programs infiltrating computers and decided to start his own company to fight back.

McAfee Associates took off.

I'm good at reading people. Why do graffiti appear on walls? People like to ruin things. There will always be hackers.

This inspired McAfee to open an antivirus company, McAfee Associates. Distributing software using the shareware model is also his idea.

By the late 1980s, the company was making $5 million a year, and some of the world's largest companies were using its antivirus platform.

Source: Digital Trends

McAfee quickly became even more successful, thanks in large part to the Michelangelo computer virus that burst onto the scene in 1992.

In 1992, he carried out his first large-scale PR campaign. With the Michelangelo virus threatening all progressive humanity, McAfee is pumping up no worse than Wang with the apocalypse.

On March 6th, up to five million computers could be destroyed by the Michelangelo virus!

McAfee called it one of the worst viruses to date, suggesting it would infect up to 5 million computers. At that time, computer antivirus platforms were not a product that most people bought. Thanks to Michelangelo, there was a rush to protect computers from viruses.

Source: Motherboard

Although only tens of thousands of computers were infected, Michelangelo forced McAfee to go public, and it turned into a multimillion-dollar business.

In 1994, McAfee set his sights on greener pastures and left McAfee. Two years later, he sold his shares, giving him about $100 million.

Since his resignation, McAfee has maintained a relatively low profile.

He gave advice to young startups, lectured at Stanford Graduate School of Business, and also worked on his own projects. He worked on two social media projects called PowWow and Tribal Voice, although neither of them became popular.

Source:

Yoga and aerial tracking

After selling the company, John McAfee writes books about yoga and does aerial tracking. McAfee is the author of a whole movement of so-called relational yoga (this is more a philosophical teaching than a technique, but not at all about databases, as you might think). You can purchase Gurus training DVDs on Amazon.

In the states of Arizona and New Mexico, a millionaire is buying up sixty hectares of land for runways, gas stations and a flight school. Creates an informal association “Heavenly Gypsies”. You can read more about aero tracking in the article “Popular Mechanics” . Let me just say that this is synonymous with the words “adrenaline” and “drive”, and the videos of aero trackers fit perfectly on Gogol Bordello.

However, in 2008, it was overtaken by economic collapse.

One report stated that his wealth had dropped from $100 million to $4 million.

Source: The New York Times.

In the late 2000s, McAfee decided to sell his land and move to Belize.

There he wanted to plunge into the world of antibiotics. He believed that with the help of microbiologist Allison Adonizio, he could create a product that used plants to fight disease. The company was called Quorumex.

— John McAfee (@officialmcafee) August 14, 2014 Source: Gizmodo

But things got tough in Belize. According to Wired, he became convinced that he was being watched all the time.

Source: Wired

In Belize, he frequented a saloon known as Lover's Bar.

He reportedly went there every day and watched people come and go. He slowly gave up everything else. He became obsessed with watching people in this poor part of town. Six months later he wrote that he no longer had contact with society.

“My fragile connection with the world of polite society was, without a doubt, severed,” he wrote. “My clothes would classify me as one of the poorly dressed beggars from Tijuana. My hygiene is no better. Yesterday I urinated in public for the first time in broad daylight.”

Source: Wired

In general, everything that happened in Belize, it seems, will remain in Belize. As Sherlock Holmes would say, "an extremely complicated story." There are several versions of the development of events: the editor of Wired magazine, the colorful story hunter Joshua Davis, who wrote the biography of McAfee John McAfee's Last Stand, the government and officials of the “pirate” Belize, and McAfee himself.

It will be unnecessary to compare versions and look for the truth, so let’s go through the chronology of events that are known for certain.

• On April 30, 2012, McAfee was arrested in Orange Walk by the Belize Police Special Organized Crime Unit on charges of manufacturing pharmaceuticals without a license and possessing an unregistered weapon. The charges were completely dropped within hours.
• On November 12, 2012, Belize police began searching for McAfee in connection with the murder of his neighbor, retired Florida engineer Gregory Vaent Fall.
• Fall was found dead of a gunshot wound to the head on November 11, 2012, at his home on Ambergris Key. The police, who arrived on call from the housekeeper, did not find any traces of a break-in. A laptop and iPhone were missing from personal belongings. The victim was arrested several times in the United States for domestic violence. No one was ever formally charged.

Reporter Joshua Davis, who stayed at McAfee's villa for a long time, wrote that McAfee surrounded himself with a crowd of armed thugs, a harem of prostitutes and finally lost touch with reality from constant drug use. The consequence of this was a severe form of paranoia.

McAfee did have armed bodyguards, a pack of fighting dogs (John always loved doggies), and local young women constantly lived in the villa. John called communication with them a “social experiment” and, upon returning to the United States, issued American visas to almost all of them.

John McAfee himself believed that the killer came for him, but he mixed up the houses, and the Belizean police want to take revenge on him. McAfee started a personal blog in which he talked about how he fought against local corrupt authorities, organizing an entire spy network for this .

He was considered a "person of interest" in 2012 when his neighbor Gregory Faull was shot and killed, according to Reuters. McAfee fled after being questioned by Belizean authorities.

Source: Reuters

McAfee was arrested in Guatemala.

Reportedly, this may have been due to Vice, which flew two reporters to see him. By mistake, Vice published photos of McAfee that still had GPS coordinates attached to them. Shortly after these events, Guatemalan police caught up with McAfee and arrested him on charges of illegal entry into the country. While in custody, McAfee suffered from a number of heart-related health problems. He was eventually expelled from Guatemala and sent back to the United States.

Source : Gawker

This was followed by a media frenzy. Everyone wanted to know who he was, where he was going and whether he was crazy.

McAfee did not make life easier for himself. In 2013, he uploaded a strange video called “How to Uninstall McAfee Antivirus.” It showed him surrounded by scantily clad women as he tried to remove software he invented, which he denounced after leaving the company. The video also showed weapons and references to drugs and drug use, although this was undoubtedly some sort of parody.

How To Uninstall McAfee Antivirus — YouTube

Source: YouTube

Since then, McAfee has maintained a sporadic public image. In 2013, he traveled to Portland, Oregon, where he reportedly still lives. He now occasionally blogs about security, privacy and freedom.

— John McAfee (@officialmcafee) June 14, 2015

Candidate of the people

In 2013, John McAfee married Janice Jason, a prostitute from Florida. The newlyweds moved from Portland, Oregon to Lexington, Tennessee. In September 2015, McAfee decided to engage in party building and announced the future “Cyber ​​Party” on his YouTube channel.

A little later, McAfee rightly decides that it will be much easier to run for president from the Libertarian Party, the third political force in the country. John speaks at the Libertarian National Convention with his election program and participates in the final televised debates in March. In the final primaries, McAfee took third place and won the states of Montana and New Hampshire.

Note that John McAfee never changed his political views and always positioned himself as a libertarian.

Would you vote for John McAfee if you had the chance?

• Yes! I like his political views and the party name is great
• For fun or for lack of a better candidate
• Of course not. In a year there will be chaos in the country, and he will escape across the border!

In July 2019, McAfee's tweet about files showing corruption sparked significant debate.

I've collected files on government corruption. This is the first time I'm mentioning names and specifics. I'll start with a corrupt CIA agent and two Bahamian officials. Come today. If I were arrested or disappeared, over 31 terabytes of incriminating data would be leaked to the press.

John McAfee (@officialmcafee) June 9, 2019

In 2019, John McAfee claimed to have a collection of files highlighting "government corruption" and said he would begin sharing by releasing files showing corruption within the CIA.

McAfee has started promoting cryptocurrencies.

And at first it seemed that he had more luck in business than in his political career. It used its public platform to promote so-called alt-coins—cryptocurrencies created as competitors to Bitcoin. And in 2018 , The Verge reported that he charged $105,000 per tweet to promote initial coin offerings. He also supported an "unhackable" crypto wallet, which was then hacked . But the way he promoted cryptocurrencies later attracted the attention of the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

You've probably heard about the story where McAfee promised to (literally?) eat his dick on national television if Bitcoin didn't reach half a million dollars.

Later, with another rise in the rate, he made an amendment : a million dollars per bitcoin until the end of 2020. Someone has already created a website fnordprefekt.de , which allows you to monitor how the forecast comes true.

While in prison in Spain, McAfee was accused of making further changes.

The SEC charged him with fraud and money laundering for using social media to promote cryptocurrencies. He later told his Twitter followers that he planned to "fade" on social media after receiving "threats" from the SEC. He said the US government had ulterior motives in requesting his extradition, and his attempt to run as a Libertarian Party candidate was a factor.

But on Wednesday, Spain's National Court found there was "no evidence" that he was being persecuted for political or ideological reasons and authorized his extradition back to the United States.

Dark twists

McAfee believed that if extradited, he would spend the rest of his life behind bars.

A few hours later he was found dead in his cell. And his lawyer said that he committed suicide. Although he never fit the mold of a Silicon Valley tech founder, his antivirus company became a huge success. But he was also a complex and unstable man, whose colorful life was punctuated by dark turns and acts of self-destruction.

And his final years were characterized by characteristic exuberance and a nihilistic contempt for authority.

However, this man has become a legend, he is the complete personification of the freedom of his thoughts, faith and his beliefs in this world. A man who actually had balls.

And with that we come to the end of this fascinating story about John McAfee. Thank you all for your attention, stay tuned.

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