A fifteen-year-old has claimed to have successfully compromised the “unhackable” Bitfi hardware wallet endorsed by John McAfee.
‘Bullshit Walks’?
In a Twitter exchange August 1, Saleem Rashid, who rose to prominence online after uncovering a vulnerability in hardware wallet Ledger in March, defied claims by Bitfi that its product boasted indestructible security.
The event follows controversy at Bitfi, having last week released photographs of the hardware used in its wallet which commentators said did not correspond to its quality claims.
“I’m not that sloppy in my work,” Rashid wrote to Bitfi on Twitter after the company voiced doubt he had successfully undermined the wallet’s integrity.
that would make sense, apart from the fact that the rooted device syncs with the Dashboard.
maybe you're mistakenly checking for a su binary, but i'm not that sloppy in my work.
— Saleem Rashid (@spudowiar) August 2, 2018
Bitfi and McAfee had previously offered a $100,000 reward for successfully hacking their product, McAfee summarizing the offer with the tagline “money talks, bullshit walks.”
“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,” he announced in July.
‘Dangerously Wrong’
Responding to Bitfi’s request to claim the bounty money, Rashid quoted security researcher Alan Woodward’s own exchange with the company.
“You are not only wrong, you are dangerously wrong,” he wrote in response to Bitfi’s misgivings about the successful hack.
…It’s not speculation based on what I’m looking at. And we don’t want your money. Give it to charity. We are concerned that others will entrust their money to something that is not secure in the way appear to suggest.
Bitfi’s website continues to call its wallet “the most sophisticated instrument in the world,” alleging its $120 price tag had a philanthropic motive.
“As a computing device it is much more costly to manufacture than ordinary hardware wallets, …our mission is to make this technology accessible to everyone and to keep it affordably priced as long as possible,” it claims.
McAfee subsequently weighed in on the debacle, calling doubts about the wallet “FUD.”
The FUD surrounding the unhackablility of the BitFi wallet, part 1: pic.twitter.com/LNgteEqR30
— John McAfee (@officialmcafee) August 2, 2018
What do you think about Saleem Rashid reportedly hacking Bitfi? Let us know in the comments below!
Images courtesy of Shutterstock, Twitter, Bitfi.com
