Antivirus Pioneer John McAfee Dead , Probe Team Says Could be Suicide

John McAfee, the outlandish security software pioneer who tried to live life as a hedonistic outsider while running from a host of legal troubles, was found dead in his jail cell near Barcelona on Wednesday.

His death came just hours after a Spanish court announced that it had approved his extradition to the United States to face tax charges punishable by decades in prison, authorities said.

McAfee, who was among other things a cryptocurrency promoter, tax opponent, US presidential candidate and fugitive, who publicly embraced drugs, guns and sex, had a history of legal woes spanning from Tennessee to Central America to the Caribbean. In 2012, he was sought for questioning in connection with the murder of his neighbor in Belize, but was never charged with a crime.

McAfee’s body was discovered at the Brians 2 penitentiary in northeastern Spain. Security personnel tried to revive him, but the jails medical team finally certified his death, a statement from the regional Catalan government said.

A judicial delegation has arrived to investigate the causes of death, the statement read. Everything points to death by suicide.

McAfee’s death was confirmed after Spain’s National Court ruled in favor of extraditing McAfee, 75, who had argued in a hearing earlier this month that the charges against him by prosecutors in Tennessee were politically motivated and that he would spend the rest of his life in prison if returned to the U.S.

The courts ruling was made public on Wednesday and was open for appeal, with any final extradition order also needing to get approval from the Spanish Cabinet.

McAfee was arrested last October at Barcelona’s international airport and had been in jail since then awaiting the outcome of extradition proceedings. The arrest followed charges the same month in Tennessee for evading taxes after failing to report income from promoting cryptocurrencies while he did consulting work, made speaking engagements and sold the rights to his life story for a documentary. The criminal charges carried a prison sentence of up to 30 years.

Nishay Sanan, the Chicago-based attorney defending him on those cases, said by phone that McAfee will always be remembered as a fighter. He tried to love this country but the US government made his existence impossible, Sanan said. They tried to erase him, but they failed.

Born in England’s Gloucestershire in 1945 as John David McAfee, he moved to Virginia as a child and grew up troubled, with a father who beat him mercilessly and killed himself with McAfee’s



shotgun when the boy was 15, said Steve Morgan, who spent time with McAfee in Alabama in 2016 to talk about his life for a biography had been contracted to write. Morgan is also the founder of market research firm Cybersecurity Ventures.

“He told me his father never showed him an ounce of affection, Morgan said, adding that recounting his father’s death was the only time during their long meeting that McAfee cried.

While McAfee’s tech legacy may have been overshadowed in recent years by his tumultuous life, Morgan said he sees his most lasting impact as a software and security pioneer.

I think that’s how ultimately he really most like to be remembered. I think a lot of people will remember him as a very troubled soul. Some people will remember him as a criminal. It depends on your age and your exposure to him, Morgan said.

McAfee founded his eponymous company in 1987. At the time, Morgan said, he was operating a BBS, a bulletin board system that served as a precursor to the World Wide Web and working with his brother-in-law. When the first major computer virus, called Brain, hit in 1986, John instantly dialed up a programmer he knew and said, there’s a big opportunity. We need to do something. You know, we want to write some code to combat this virus, Morgan said. He called the program Virus Scan and the company McAfee Associates.

He was a true pioneer, not just as a security technologist but as one of the first companies to distribute software over the internet, Morgan said.

California chipmaker Intel, which bought McAfees company in 2011 for $7.68 billion, for a time sought to dissociate the brand from its controversial founder by folding it into its larger cybersecurity division. But the rebranding was short-lived, and Intel in 2016 spun out the cybersecurity unit into a new company called McAfee.

In the software industry, McAfees claim to fame was that he offered the first all-in-one virus scanner, said Vesselin Bontchev, a Bulgarian computer scientist and an early antivirus researcher. Prior to that, said Bontchev, researchers would only scan for one virus at a time. But there were only about a dozen computer viruses back then.

The two later met in the U.S. at the annual Virus Bulletin conference, said Bontchev. I don’t think he was a typical American. He was just weird.

McAfee twice made long-shot runs for the U.S. presidency and was a participant in Libertarian Party presidential debates in 2016. He dabbled in yoga, ultralight aircraft and the production of herbal medications.