‘Propaganda intended to incite Americans’: John McAfee to RT on ‘Russian hacking’ claims
The sloppiness of the alleged DNC hack proves it was not organized by a nation state, and “utter nonsense” presented as proof of Moscow’s involvement just shows intelligence agencies are “ignorant and naïve,” John McAfee told RT.
Cybersecurity legend McAfee is one of the modern computer tech pioneers and the developer of the first commercial antivirus program, who has been in the business for the past 50 years. He is also the CEO of MGT Capital Investments, and a former presidential candidate for the Libertarian Party.
The so-called evidence of the Russian involvement in the hacks not only looks like “the most deceptive propaganda was perpetrated on the American public” but actually proves quite the opposite, McAfee believes.
“In there are four facts which they claim prove that Russia did this hack. It was utter nonsense. The information was number one – Russian language was found in the malware. Number two – a Cyrillic keyboard was used. The forensic science can now tell what type of keyboard was used to develop a piece of a malware,” McAfee told RT.
“Number three – the compiler, the piece of software that compiles the code so that it can execute, always dated time stamps. The time stamps were in a time zone for the business hours of Moscow and St. Petersburg and other places in Russia and the number four that the IP address pointed to a Russian address.”
To make it simple for the American audience, McAfee metaphorically explained the situation:
“Seriously, if Russia declared war on us because we hacked Russia and the head of the CIA and the intelligence committee came to the Congress and they ask him ‘What happened?’ – ‘Oh, well you know we didn’t have time to remove English language, we didn’t have time to move the date stamp, the guy could not use a Chinese keyboard, so we gave him our regular keyboard. And also there was my wife’s birthday so I could not remove the IP address.’”
“Please, that person would be scheduled for a suicide,” McAfee concluded.
Thus, McAfee believes, the whole “Russian hacking” narrative is either “propaganda intended to incite the American people, to anger toward Russia for some reason, or our intelligence community is so ignorant and naïve that they should all be replaced.”
Cybersecurity specialist believes that based on the presented evidence the hack “cannot possibly be an organized nation-state.”
“The hack on the DNC used a piece of malware a year and a half old and there have been many updates since then, McAfee said. “This was done by an independent one person kid that downloaded the software. Please, this is not an organized hack and certainly not a nation-state that did this.”
