Want $100K? Just hack John McAfee's 'unhackable' crypto-wallet

If you can succeed.

Marrian Zhou Staff Reporter

Marrian Zhou is a Beijing-born Californian living in New York City. She joined CNET as a staff reporter upon graduation from Columbia Journalism School. When Marrian is not reporting, she is probably binge watching, playing saxophone or eating hot pot.

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Marrian Zhou

July 27, 2018 5:46 a.m. PT

2 min read

You can nab a hefty cash prize if you can break into John McAfee's Bitfi wallet.

The antivirus software pioneer and self-proclaimed "crypto visionary" tweeted on Tuesday that he'll give anyone a $100,000 bounty if they can hack his "unhackable" cryptocurrency wallet.

For all you naysayers who claim that “nothing is unhackable” & who don’t believe that my Bitfi wallet is truly the world’s first unhackable device, a $100,000 bounty goes to anyone who can hack it. Money talks, bullshit walks. Details on https://t.co/ATFaxwUzQC
— John McAfee (@officialmcafee) July 24, 2018

McAfee partnered with hardware wallet company Bitfi last month to launch the first "truly unhackable and open-source crypto-wallet," according to CoinTrust. Hardware wallets are cryptocurrency wallets that store your private keys in a secure hardware device.

McAfee and Bitfi are very confident about their crypto-wallet's security.

"This bounty program is not intended to help Bitfi to identify security vulnerabilities," the company wrote on its website for the contest, "since we already claim that our security is absolute and that the wallet cannot be hacked or penetrated by outside attacks."

However, McAfee's bounty program looks more like an advertising campaign for Bitfi because you have to purchase a Bitfi wallet and preload it with $50 worth of coins in order to participate. If you can hack into the wallet you bought and extract the coins, that would be considered a successful hack, and you could claim the $100K cash prize.

This isn't the first stunt McAfee has pulled. He tweeted earlier in April that he's charging $105,000 per tweet promoting a cryptocurrency or an initial coin offering, which allows potential buyers to invest in a cryptocurrency before launch.

"Our core mission is to support the adoption of decentralized assets and this can only happen [if] storage is impenetrable and very easy to use," said Daniel Khesin, CEO of Bitfi, in an email statement. "Bitfi wallet is completely unhackable and it is a huge leap in security over any other form of storage."

First published on July 26, 2:04 p.m. PT.

Updates on July 27, 5:46 a.m. PT: Adds Bitfi CEO Daniel Khesin statement.

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