John McAfee claims to have hacked into encrypted messages on WhatsApp

John McAfee, once known as the creator of the first commercial antivirus programme and now someone who got bogged down legal issues involving drugs and unlicensed weapons, claimed that he along with his team has been able to read an encrypted WhatsApp message on Android. McAfee, infamous for making foot in the mouth statements, shared this with research and market intelligence firm Cybersecurity Ventures. The firm claims that the WhatsApp message was exchanged between co-operating researches located at the New York City headquarters office of LIFARS - a cyber intelligence and digital forensics firm that is involved in the mobile security domain. Cybersecurity Ventures adds that a tiny app written by McAfee’s team was downloaded onto brand new Android phones which were used for message exchange and within a minute, McAfee and team could read the message. McAfee has also mentioned very clearly to the research firm that this flaw is more due to Google’s Android than WhatsApp. Reports floating online claim that he tried to trick reporters into believing that he and his team has hacked into WhatsApp encryption.  The report by Gizmodo shares that this news should be taken with a pinch of salt as McAfee and team could well be cooking this story up to ‘get a s**tload of public attention’ just like he did when he lied about being able to break open the terrorist’s iPhone in the San Bernardino shooting case. “Some reporters that had been contacted by McAfee about a demo […] got in touch with me. I talked to McAfee on the phone, he reluctantly told me that it was a malware thing with pre-cooked phones, and all the outlets he’d contacted decided not to cover it after he gave them details about how it’d work,” Moxie Marlinspike, known to have developed encryption protocol used in WhatsApp told the news site.