John McAfee has recently announced on his Twitter, that he is ready to pay compensation to anyone who is able to crack his company’s development - cryptocurrency wallet Bitfi. He called Bitfi "unhackable" and offered skeptics to test this personally. Initially, McAfee has promised a $100,000 reward, but his followers noted that the size of the proposed award was suspiciously modest for an unbreakable device and maybe it is just another marketing move in order to sell more wallets. (Anyone who wants to try to crack Bitfi, must first buy it for $120.)
That is why McAfee stated that he is ready to pay $250,000, and also concretized the task. Programmers are offered to purchase a wallet that already contains cryptocurrency and has unknown password. It is required to extract tokens from the device, and only then it will be considered as hacked. The key used to access the cryptocurrency is not stored on the device itself.
WHY IS IT IMPORTANT?
McAfee published a series of video messages, where he continued to insist that Bitfi is "unhackable" because it "uses blockchain" as well as the device has "no memory" and there is nothing to break. That’s why getting root access, in his opinion, is absolutely useless and does not help to steal money from the wallet. In addition, he called everyone who uses two-factor authentication idiots (and told how easy it is to perform a SIM swap attack these days, or basically to, re-issue the victim's SIM card by contacting the operator and applying social engineering or cloning the SIM).
Previously, information security experts stated that the "unhackable” Bitfi is built on the basis of the primitive Android smartphone, with some components removed (generally directly responsible for cellular communication). It turned out that Bitfi operates on the basis of Mediatek MT6580 and device, in fact, repeats the structure of many smartphones. At the same time, Bitfi costs $150, while in reality, such hardware can hardly cost more than $35. Later, specialists managed to get the root access to the device, and hacked wallet continued to work, contacting the back-end and allowing to enter the Bitfi account. In response to these publications by IB-specialists, John McAfee first called all the allegations groundless and said that these are the machinations of monopoly competitors.