Exclusive: McAfee Offers $20M to Hack Bitfi Wallet; Hackers Accept The drama with the Bitfi wallet continues to evolve as the company removes its “unhackable” claim and both its bounties from its website, which prompted outrage from hackers who managed to execute an evil maid attack on the device. This escalated into a moment where John McAfee offered to fly one of the hackers in and allow them to hack his own personal device, letting them keep the $20 million in crypto he has on it if they succeed.
https://twitter.com/officialmcafee/status/1035980830957613057?s=21
Bitfi directed Cryptovest towards these tweets, adding that the offer “came straight from Mr. McAfee” and that the company “had nothing to do with this $20m offer.”
“No evidence”
During our interview with Bill Powell, VP of operations at Bitfi, he said that the hackers did not provide any evidence for their claims of hacking the device.
Shortly after we spoke to Powell, we established communication with the hackers through Andrew Tierney—a.k.a. Cybergibbons, a security consultant who speaks for the collective called THCMKACGASSCO. He told us the other side of the story, pointing us to a video of an evil maid attack performed on a Bitfi wallet.
https://twitter.com/spudowiar/status/1031301920303063045
On August 27, we received an email from Bitfi in response to the story we published.
“You will notice that, as always, [Cybergibbons] provides no evidence or reproducible method of different kinds of attacks other than simply claiming that they have been able to successfully achieve them. Since you spoke to us, we have made considerable effort to get these hackers to claim bounty [sic] and all requests were ignored. You will note that in one instance we offered to make payment if he would simply take a few minutes to speak to our engineers on the phone (because he did not want to send in the device),” a spokesperson for the company told us.
We saw the tweets and pushed a little further, asking whether the lack of cooperation may have come from a possible breakdown in communication following a tweet from the company that has been interpreted as a threat by the community at large.
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