The first antivirus I ever used was Norton.
I was young and broke,
so I think I borrowed a copy off of LimeWire.
Looking back now, it's probably not a great idea
to get your antivirus software from a peer-to-peer network.
Anyways, I always felt a little better
having that little icon always in my task.
bar, supposedly protecting me, yet somehow my computer always ended up getting infected.
After Norton, I moved to ESET Nod32. They don't have it anymore, but back in the day,
they had a cool-looking robot logo that looked like it was straight out of the iRobot movie.
After that, I finally settled on Malwarebytes, after using it to help remove a worm that infected
a company I worked for, and seeing how well it worked at cleaning up friends and family's laptops
that were riddled with malware. All of that to say, I never used a McAfee antivirus,
but I've always been fascinated with the story of the founder, John McAfee. This episode contains
some adult material, so if you don't want to hear it, or you have children around,
you may want to skip it. From a charismatic and unpredictable salesman,
to pioneering the antivirus industry, on this episode of In The Shell.
Okay, why we're not shipping Windows 98? Absolutely.
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John McAfee's journey began far from the tech corridors of Silicon Valley. Born in the United
Kingdom in 1945 and raised in Virginia, USA, his early years were marked by turmoil. His father,
an abusive alcoholic, cast a long shadow over his childhood, a trauma that would haunt McAfee for life.
Every day I wake up with him, he admitted in 2012, reflecting on the painful memory of his father's
suicide when John was just 15. Despite the instability at home, McAfee displayed early
flashes of ingenuity. While studying at Roanoke College, he launched a magazine business with a crafty
twist. The magazines were free, but he charged customers for shipping. I'm explaining to them why
it's not free and why they are going to pay for it, he later laughed, but the ruse worked and I made a
fortune. This mix of confidence and cunning would become a McAfee trademark. Yet those same college
years also revealed his self-destructive tendencies. He drank heavily and squandered his earnings on
alcohol. He enrolled in a PhD program in mathematics, but was expelled after a scandalous affair with a
student whom he later married. Drifting between jobs in the late 1960s, he picked up computing skills
working on punch card systems and eventually landed a position at Missouri Pacific Railroad
programming train schedules. But by then, his experiments with drugs had escalated. McAfee would show up to work
high on LSD, pushing the boundaries of his mind and his sanity. One fateful day, he took an entire bag of
DMT in one go. Within an hour, my mind was shattered, he later recalled. The experience cost him his job
and nearly his grip on reality. By the 1970s, McAfee was a gifted programmer bouncing between prestigious tech
jobs, including stints at NASA, Xerox, and GE, while spiraling
deeper into substance abuse. He was brilliant, but increasingly volatile. Hitting rock bottom
turned out to be a dark blessing. In 1983, after waking up from yet another Coke and Scotch binge
at his desk, McAfee finally sought help in Alcoholics Anonymous. He got sober and rebooted
his life just in time for a fateful encounter with a new kind of technological menace,
one that would transform him from a wayward genius into a tech pioneer.
By 1986, John McAfee was working as an engineer at Lockheed in Silicon Valley when news surfaced
of something unprecedented, a self-replicating program called the Bryan Virus, the first of its
kind to spread via floppy disks on IBM PCs. Where others saw a looming threat, McAfee saw an opportunity
he immediately called a colleague, electrified by the prospect of what he later described as a
game-changing moment. Steve Morgan, a colleague and biographer, recalled, John instantly dialed
up a programmer he knew and said there's a big opportunity. We need to write some code
to combat this virus. In 1987, McAfee quit his job and founded McAfee Associates
with a single mission, to fight computer viruses. McAfee's approach was as unconventional as the man
himself. He created VirusScan, one of the first antivirus programs for personal computers,
but instead of selling it in shrink-wrapped boxes like traditional software, he distributed it as
shareware through electronic bulletin board systems, an early online channel predating the web.
This was a revolutionary strategy in the late 80s.
Users could download VirusScan for free from McAfee's home base BBS in Santa Clara,
test it out on their infected systems, and pay a registration fee if they found it useful.
This distribution model helped McAfee's software spread faster than the threats it was designed to eliminate.
VirusScan introduced a key innovation.
It was one of the first all-in-one virus scanners capable of detecting multiple viruses at once.
Before this, security researchers typically wrote separate tools for each new virus,
a cumbersome approach in a rapidly evolving threat landscape.
VirusScan wasn't groundbreaking in its complexity, but the idea was transformative.
John McAfee, a one-man software shop, had effectively launched the antivirus industry.
The timing was perfect. As personal computers proliferated, so did anxieties about security
breaches. From his modest California home, McAfee's fledging company took off. By the late
1980s, McAfee Associates was reportedly earning $5 million annually, as major corporations adopted
his software to safeguard their business systems. In an era when few had ever heard the term
cybersecurity, John McAfee was turning it into a booming industry. Remarkably, he did it all
without outside investors, relying instead on a direct-to-user mail-order model, an early bootstrap
tech startup before that became the Silicon Valley cliché. McAfee's brash personality and the growing
effectiveness of his own software quickly made him a go-to medium.
media expert on computer viruses.
I see infections of small companies where every computer has become infected,
and the company is near collapse from financial loss.
Virus expert John McAfee, president of a newly formed computer virus association,
helps companies recover from attacks.
But the true explosion of public awareness was yet to come,
sparked by a single word, Michelangelo.
In early 1992, a new computer virus named Michelangelo began making headlines.
Unlike most viruses at the time, this one had a built-in trigger.
It was programmed to activate on March 6th, the artist's birthday,
destroying data on infected machines.
Computer users won't be joining in all the celebrations for Michelangelo's birthday this Friday,
because on that day, a new and deadly virus is scheduled to strike.
computers around the world. Sensing an opportunity, John McAfee seized the moment.
In February 1992, he issued a dramatic warning. Michelangelo could potentially wipe data from up
to 5 million computers, a catastrophe in the making. The media ran with the story,
amplifying the panic. Competitors in the young antivirus industry echoed similar dire predictions,
and newspapers splashed ominous headlines. Virtually overnight, computer security became
a front-page concern. As March 6th approached, people around the world anxiously booted their
PCs, fearing mass data loss. John McAfee, ever the showman, positioned himself as the antivirus
savior with the cure in hand, his software. Thousands rushed to purchase antivirus tools.
hoping to shield their machines from the impending digital disaster.
But when the day arrived, the apocalypse never materialized.
Michelangelo turned out to be more hype than havoc.
The day of techno-doom turned out to be a dud, the Associated Press reported dryly.
Instead of the millions predicted, only an estimated tens of thousands of computers were actually infected.
At Boston University, just three out of the 2,000 campus computers were hit.
Global corporations like AT&T reported only a handful of cases.
For McAfee, it hardly mattered that Michelangelo fizzled.
The scare had achieved exactly what he had intended.
It made antivirus software essential.
Before Michelangelo, computer security was an afterthought for most users.
Many didn't even realize viruses existed.
alone feel the need to buy software to combat them. That changed almost overnight. In the wake
of widespread fear, McAfee became a household name in cybersecurity. Later that year, McAfee
Associates capitalized on the momentum and went public, raising $42 million in its IPO. A new
multi-million dollar industry had been born, and John McAfee had just ridden its first wave
to fortune and fame. With millions in his bank account, and his company now a Silicon Valley
powerhouse, McAfee's lifestyle had shifted dramatically. No longer just an entrepreneur,
he was becoming a full-fledged eccentric. He bought a massive estate in Woodland Park, Colorado,
where he built a yoga retreat, experimented with meditation, and dabbled in holistic medicine.
He was about absolute f***ing.
Freedom. Once I realized I had f**k you money, he later admitted, I'd just stopped caring what
people thought. Critics later accused McAfee of exaggerating virus threats to drive sales,
with some even whispering conspiracies that he might have created the virus himself,
a claim overwhelmingly denied by those who worked with him. But the truth was more nuanced.
Michelangelo was real, with McAfee's team documenting around 60,000 infections, hardly
insignificant. And he wasn't the only one raising alarms, but he was the loudest. His talent for
stirring public fear was a mix of genuine concern and marketing genius, blurring the lines between
caution and opportunism. As one journalist quipped, it was hard to tell where McAfee's paranoia ended
and his sales pitch began. The problem is getting worse.
We're seeing a new virus arrive on the scene at the rate of about one a month now.
Most of the new viruses are worse than the old viruses because they are more subtle,
more sophisticated, and they cause a great deal more damage.
Regardless of intent, the Michelangelo incident cemented John McAfee's status
as the godfather of antivirus software.
Inside McAfee Associates, John McAfee's personality was as legendary as his media exploits.
Charismatic and unpredictable, he inspired fierce loyalty among employees
who saw themselves as warriors in a digital battlefield.
It felt like we were saving the world from computer viruses
or connecting humanity through the internet, one early staffer recalled.
To McAfee, this wasn't just business, it was war.
He thrived on...
competition, wielding intellect and aggression to outmaneuver rivals. His intensity was electrifying
to allies and intimidating to adversaries. The culture was as wild as its founder.
Employees described a workplace that felt more like a counterculture tech cult than a traditional
software company. There were late-night coding marathons fueled by energy drinks, fast food,
and according to some employees, even stronger substances. Here's a clip from the 2016 Showtime
documentary, Gringo, The Dangerous Life of John McAfee, that sums up the culture.
Three of the women were supposedly witches, and they would sit in the conference room and have
like a little chant. Andrea Nation would come in in the morning with a bottle of Windex and clean off
Do-
Larson's desk, because there was a sex contest going on, you get points.
They had a group called Little Foxes, where they would give points for having sex in different
spots of the office.
John being this free spirit, that made the culture of the company.
It was the Wild West.
John loved chaos.
He thought it made people more creative, one former executive recalled.
And for a while, it did.
By the early 90s, McAfee Associates was raking in millions, and John was being hailed as
a tech visionary.
As you can probably guess, John was never one to follow the rules, in business or in
life.
That philosophy fueled both his innovation and his reputation.
He loved eccentric designs and unfiltered honesty.
When antivirus researcher Veselin Banchev applied for a job in the early 90s,
McAfee rejected him with a bizarre excuse,
claiming falsely that the U.S. government suspected Banchev, a Bulgarian, of being a Soviet spy.
It was the strangest way to say no, Banchev later laughed,
recalling McAfee's paranoia-tinged response.
When they eventually met at a conference, Banchev found him just weird,
far from the button-up executive one might expect.
By the early 90s, McAfee Associates was thriving,
but John McAfee himself was growing increasingly erratic.
His unconventional leadership style had always been part of the company's DNA,
but as success mounted, so did his paranoia and unpredictability.
It was like we were saving the world, one employee said, but his leadership could turn chaotic.
One day he'd be throwing impromptu office parties, the next storming through the halls,
convinced spies were sabotaging the company.
Traditional corporate structures didn't interest him. Rules were for other people.
Meetings could be interrupted by sudden outbursts or physical demonstrations of his latest obsession.
John would sometimes show up in a full karate GI, barefoot in the middle of the day, an employee recounted,
just to practice his moves in the office.
Others remembered the old shotgun he kept propped up against his desk, not for security, just because he liked the way it looked.
By 1992, McAfee had fully embraced his larger-than-life persona.
He fueled public fears about computer viruses, amplifying hysteria.
while positioning himself as cybersecurity's last line of defense.
Some employees began to wonder, was he truly on a mission to stop digital threats,
or was he simply obsessed with control?
As McAfee's fame grew, so did his distrust of the world.
Even as McAfee Associates raked in millions, he became obsessed with the idea that he was being watched.
He spoke of government agencies monitoring him, convinced they wanted to steal his technology, or silence him.
He installed multiple phone lines at his home, each with a different purpose, some allegedly to throw off eavesdroppers.
He refused to drink from an open bottle unless he had watched it being opened, fearing enemies might try to poison him.
Eventually his paranoia bled into his personal life.
Always a thrill seeker, skydiving.
racing motorcycles, experimenting with meditation and hallucinogens. McAfee's behavior became
increasingly erratic. He would disappear for days without explanation, sometimes returning with
radical new ideas, other times with a haunted look in his eyes. Running a traditional company
no longer interested him. When I started, there were four of us. We were making millions and life
was simple. Now I had a thousand bosses, the SEC, the FTC. I was an accountant instead of an engineer.
In 1993, he stepped back from daily operations, and in 1994, he left McAfee Associates entirely.
The company was thriving, and two years later, he sold his remaining stake for around $100 million.
Most entrepreneurs would have settled into a comfortable retirement.
but John McAfee was not most entrepreneurs. His departure wasn't the end of his story.
It was the beginning of something far stranger. John McAfee's name remained synonymous with
digital security long after he walked away from the company that bore it. McAfee Associates,
later renamed McAfee Inc., continued to grow, becoming one of the most recognizable names in
cybersecurity. In 2011, Intel acquired the company for a staggering $7.7 billion. Yet even a tech
giant like Intel couldn't erase the McAfee brand. After a failed attempt at rebranding, the name was
restored, proving its lasting power in the cybersecurity market. But McAfee's legacy runs
far deeper than the corporate logo. Every antivirus update, every cybersecurity headline,
Take care, and I'll see you next time.