Published Sept 7 2017, Romania
Not feeling so well today so I rested and watched an interview with John McAfee about the state of Cyber Security. John is an intelligent, outspoken character who started McAfee antivirus back in the 80s, then I remember him being in the news, on the run and being deported regarding his neighbor in Belize being murdered a few years ago. (He appears suspicious.) Now heās peddling security software again, and crypto opportunities. I took some hopefully pertinent notes from the talk.
Interviewer: Whatās the state of Cyber Security in 2017?
John M: We have none.
While you are watching your phone, your phone is watching you. This is just a fact of life.
The anti-virus paradigm is no longer functional, it doesnāt work. And Iām the person who invented it. Viruses arenāt the problem, hackers are. Itās a reactive paradigm, and thatās the problem. We have to become proactive. (Heās developing a product āSentinelā to ID the hackers coming in.)
Smart phones are spy devices. Google: If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. –Ridiculous.
Everybody exercises different degrees of privacy hundreds of times a day. We are humans, we live in an imperfect world.
On Cryptocurrency:
How secure is Bitcoin? I think itās extremely secure. On the other hand, people put crypto wallets on their smartphones, and over half of smartphones are infected with key-logging software.
Pornography–the first thing the site does is download a rooting software. After the jailbreak, they download a keylogger. Only takes seconds, and from that point on, somebody is watching. People pay the porn sites to push keylogging software on to phones.
If you have an online wallet, an online account, the next day your money may disappear.
We all have secrets, yes? So why are we giving our data to companies?
Why do we use the cloud? It makes life easy, I can access my data from anywhere. The Cloud is OK for some types of things.
Bitcoin is a New Paradigm of Money
Whether bitcoin or Ethereum or Monero or whatever, you need to Educate yourself, it is easy to lose your money in Crypto
Offline wallet: trezor, seed keys display on the trezor, not on desktop. Donāt keep your wallet on any device.
Future security: Look 4 hacker, not the malware.
The world is on a dangerous cliff. Weāre allowing these devices to master us, not the other way around.
At least a dozen big nation States have the power to bring down another nationās power grid.
I didnāt hear anything about the $500K for bitcoin in the talk, but I may have dozed off when he said it. I did find he said that in twitter in July of 2017: āI Promise to āEat My Own Dickā If Bitcoin Doesnāt Reach 500k In Three YearsāĀ Seems like just a bit of click bait.