“Anti-virus software creator John McAfee has said he will break the encryption on an iPhone that belonged to San Bernardino killer Syed Farook,” Chris Baraniuk reports for BBC News. “Apple has refused to comply with a court order asking it to unlock the device, dividing opinion over whether the firm should be compelled to do so.”
“Mr McAfee said he and his team would take on the task ‘free of charge,'” Baraniuk reports. “The offer came as Mr McAfee continues his campaign as a US presidential candidate for the Libertarian Party. ‘It will take us three weeks,’ he claimed in his article.”
“Security expert Graham Cluley told the BBC he was sceptical of Mr McAfee’s claims. ‘The iPhone is notoriously difficult to hack compared to other devices,’ he said,” Baraniuk reports. “‘The FBI isn’t interested anyway, they want to set a precedent that there shouldn’t be locks they can’t break,’ he added.”
“Mr McAfee stated that he was keen to unlock the device because he didn’t want Apple to be forced to implement a ‘back door’ – a method by which security services could access data on encrypted devices,” Baraniuk reports. “Mr McAfee believes that it would be possible to retrieve data from the phone by other means – though he did not give many details of how it would be done. ‘I would eat my shoe on the Neil Cavuto [television] show if we could not break the encryption on the San Bernardino phone,’ he added.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: “The FBI isn’t interested anyway, they want to set a precedent that there shouldn’t be locks they can’t break.” And there you have it all in a nutshell.
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