Zone Labs: Anatomy of a Coverup

How angels stay clean and scandals stay silent.

Part Two - How It Doesn't Work I

To understand a bit of what's going on here, we have to go back in history. But fortunately not far at all.

John McAfee is nothing if not persistent, and curiously enough not only succeeds by failing, but even goes so far as to boast about it. He flailed about Michelangelo and was dead wrong. He sold AIDS-Free badges on the streets of San Francisco and those who trusted him were dead wrong. He powwowed with the Indians and was dead wrong. He ran across Steve Gibson and he was dead right.

Gibson and McAfee first teamed up when the Dark Avenger was still a name to inspire fear - the way 'l0pht' and 'nmap' do today. The Dark Avenger created the Virus Mutation Engine, also known as MtE, and although it soon found its way into oblivion, John McAfee understood the inherent value in creating hysteria about it. He contacted Steve Gibson and Gibbo dutifully wrote a typical Gibson article for his then publisher about 'the end of the world as we know it.' There was no stopping the Dark Avenger, wrote Gibson. We were all doomed. All our computers were going to turn to mush and evil things. There was no cure, no protection.

A funny way to sell a product, right? Wrong. Sales of McAfee Anti-Virus soared. What McAfee knew Gibson could do so well was create hysteria, and when people are hysterical they don't think rationally. McAfee was to use this very same technique several years later when he decided personal firewalls were the new cash cow.

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