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Information about Steve Gibson

For other people named Steve Gibson see Steve Gibson (disambiguation)


Steve Gibson (born March 1955) is a computer enthusiast, software engineer and security commentator based in Laguna Hills, California. Gibson founded Gibson Research Corporation in 1985, and is currently its primary of three employees.

Gibson studied EECS at UC Berkeley.

Works

Gibson has had a very long career in the technology field starting in his teen years. He began in hardware projects but moved more towards software development in the 1980s.

Gibson is an advocate of assembly language programming, and prides himself on writing whole applications exclusively in assembly language, including the SpinRite hard disk utility. He is one of several advocates of optimizing computer programs and reducing the size of their executables.

In the 1990s, Gibson began to move into the computer security field, developing and distributing a number of security tools, including the ShieldsUp! port-scanner, and the LeakTest firewall tester. In 2000, Gibson created one of the first adware removal programs, OptOut.

Gibson's latest work is SecurAble, which is a program that will tell the user if their CPU supports 64 bit, DEP (Data Execution Prevention) and hardware level virtual machines.

Gibson Research Corporation

Gibson Research Corporation or GRC is a computer software development firm founded in 1985 by Gibson. The company is registered in Laguna Hills, California[1]. GRC has created a number of niche utilities over the years, the foremost of which is SpinRite, a hard disk scanning and data recovery utility.

GRC also offers a few free utilities for Internet security such as a port scan test for firewalls.

As of early 2006 GRC had three employees, including Gibson.

Media

Steve Gibson is a contributing editor to InfoWorld magazine. His writings try to provide visibility into the world of hackers and , of which he counts himself one of the former.

Gibson co-hosts a computer security-focused podcast with Leo Laporte called Security Now!. Gibson appears sometimes on Leo Laporte's technology podcast, This Week in Tech. Gibson also occasionally appears on The Lab with Leo Laporte on G4techTV Canada.

In April 2006, Gibson made an acting appearance alongside technology columnist John C. Dvorak in the video podcast Up in Smoke.

Criticism

Gibson has generated controversy by taking unusual positions on security and other technical issues, and for doing so with a demeanor often perceived as self-aggrandizing. He is a contentious figure even among his fellow InfoWorld columnists.[2]

Notable examples of criticism include:
  • Claimed to have "independently invented" SYN cookies, a SYN flood denial of service avoidance technique invented by Daniel J. Bernstein.[3] Syn cookies are supported in Linux since 1997, syncookies are widely known among programmers interested in the field.
  • Similarly in Security Now episode 109 Steve mentioned he had designed a way of keeping session data between a client and web server without the need for cookies or client side scripts.[4] Steve said he had never heard of such a thing being done before but numerous listeners pointed out in episode 110 that such technology had existed for a long time in ASP.NET.[5]
  • Stated that raw sockets in Windows XP could be the "enabling factor for the creation of a series of 'Ultimate Weapons' against which the fundamentally trusting architecture of the global Internet currently has no effective defense".[6] No such "weapons" have surfaced. Fyodor, the author of Nmap, stated that Gibson's "'findings' are not new, are always filled with massive hyperbole, and are frequently completely false".[7] Microsoft limited raw socket support in Windows XP Service Pack 2, a move described by some as "crippling"; probably due to criticism from users influenced by Steven Gibson and in favor for their own interface NetMon.
  • Claimed that the Windows Metafile vulnerability was intentionally engineered into Windows by Microsoft as a backdoor for their use.[8] Gibson also suggested in episode 22 of his Security Now podcast that Microsoft's reason for patching the vulnerability may have been due to an "industrious hacker" who found out about it and had been using it.[9]

See also

References

1. ^ Gibson Research Corporation, Techadvice.com. Retrieved on 2 February 2007.
2. ^ P.J. Connolly. Another hole in XP. InfoWorld. Retrieved on 2006-06-25.
3. ^ D. J. Bernstein. SYN cookies. D. J. Bernstein. Retrieved on 2006-06-25.
4. ^ Transcript of Security Now 109.
5. ^ Transcript of Security Now 110.
6. ^ Steve Gibson (September 17, 2005). The Strange Tale of the Denial of Service Attacks on GRC.com. Gibson Research Corporation. Retrieved on 2006-06-25.
7. ^ Fyodor. Nmap Hackers: Re: Steve Gibson vs. Microsoft. Nmap Hackers. Retrieved on 2006-12-24.
8. ^ Steve Gibson (January 12th, 2006). grc.news.feedback. Gibson Research Corporation. Retrieved on 2006-06-25.
9. ^ Steve Gibson; Leo Laporte (January 13, 2006). Security Now! Episode 22 "The Windows MetaFile Backdoor?" transcript. Gibson Research Corporation. Retrieved on 2006-06-25.

External links

Steve Gibson may refer to a number of people:
  • Steve Gibson (born 1955), an American computer engineer and journalist
  • Steve Gibson (born 1958), an English entrepreneur and chairman of Middlesbrough Football Club.

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City of Laguna Hills, California

Seal
Location of Laguna Hills within Orange County, California.
Coordinates:
Country United States
State California
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20th century - 21st century
1950s  1960s  1970s  - 1980s -  1990s  2000s  2010s
1982 1983 1984 - 1985 - 1986 1987 1988

Year 1985 (MCMLXXXV) was a common year starting on Tuesday (link displays 1985 Gregorian calendar).
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EECS (sometimes pronounced "eeks") is an abbreviation for Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences. It is a designation used at some universities for the major or department of the same name.
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University of California, Berkeley is a public research university located in Berkeley, California, United States. Commonly referred to as UC Berkeley, Berkeley and Cal
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assembly language is a low-level language for programming computers. It implements a symbolic representation of the numeric machine codes and other constants needed to program a particular CPU architecture.
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Maintainer: Gibson Research Corporation

OS: Windows 2000, XP, and Vista [1]

Use: Hard Disk Recovery
License: proprietary and Commercial software
Website: GRC.
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Adware or advertising-supported software is any software package which automatically plays, displays, or downloads advertising material to a computer after the software is installed on it or while the application is being used.
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Software development is the translation of a user need or marketing goal into a software product.[1][2] Software development is sometimes understood to encompass the processes of software engineering combined with the research and goals of software marketing
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City of Laguna Hills, California

Seal
Location of Laguna Hills within Orange County, California.
Coordinates:
Country United States
State California
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Computer software is a general term used to describe a collection of computer programs, procedures and documentation that perform some task on a computer system. [1]
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Maintainer: Gibson Research Corporation

OS: Windows 2000, XP, and Vista [1]

Use: Hard Disk Recovery
License: proprietary and Commercial software
Website: GRC.
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Hard disk drive

An IBM hard disk drive with the metal cover removed. The platters are highly reflective.
Date Invented: September 13 1956
Invented By: An IBM team led by Reynold Johnson
Connects to:
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Data recovery is the process of salvaging data from damaged, failed, corrupted or inaccessible primary storage media when it cannot be accessed normally. Often the data are being salvaged from storage media formats such as hard disk drive, storage tapes, CDs, DVDs, RAID, and other
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Internet security is the process of protecting data and privacy of devices connected to internet from information robbery, hacking, malware infection and unwanted software.
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A port scanner is a piece of software designed to search a network host for open ports. This is often used by administrators to check the security of their networks and by hackers to compromise it.
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firewall is a hardware or software device which is configured to permit, deny, or proxy data through a computer network which has different levels of trust.

Function


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InfoWorld is an information technology online media and events business operating under the umbrella of InfoWorld Media Group, a division of IDG (International Data Group).
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Hacker has several common meanings, the unifying characteristic of which is only that it refers to a person who is an avid computer enthusiast. It is most commonly used as a pejorative by the mass media to refer to a person who engages in illegal computer cracking, which is its
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A podcast is a digital media file, or a related collection of such files, which is distributed over the Internet using syndication feeds for playback on portable media players and personal computers.
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Leo Laporte

Birth name Leo Gordon Laporte
Born November 29 1956 (1956--) (age 52)
New York City, New York

Show The Tech Guy

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Security Now! is a weekly podcast hosted by Leo Laporte and Steve Gibson. It is part of the TWiT.tv network. The first episode was released on 19 August 2005.
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this WEEK in TECH, casually referred to as TWiT, and formerly known as Revenge of the Screen Savers — is an award winning, weekly podcast (and occasional videocast) of the TWiT.tv network [3] .
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The Lab with Leo Laporte is a technology-based television program hosted by Leo Laporte. The first episode aired on April 23 2007 simultaneously on G4techTV Canada and HOW TO Channel Australia. The program is produced by Greedy Productions in Vancouver, Canada.
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Availability
Satellite
Bell ExpressVu Channel 515
Star Choice Channel 514
Cable
Available on most Canadian cable systems Check local listings G4techTV Canada
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April 2006 : ← - January - February - March - April - May - June - July - August - September - October - November - December- →

Deaths
  • 2: Nina von Stauffenberg
  • 2: Michael J.

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John Charles Dvorak [1] (born 1952 in Los Angeles, California) is an American columnist and broadcaster in the areas of technology and computing. His writing extends back to the 1980s, when he was a mainstay of a variety of magazines.
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Video podcast (sometimes shortened to vidcast or vodcast) is a term used for the online delivery of video on demand video clip content via Atom or RSS enclosures.
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SYN Cookies are the key element of a technique used to guard against SYN flood attacks. Daniel J. Bernstein, the technique's primary inventor, defines SYN Cookies as "particular choices of initial TCP sequence numbers by TCP servers.
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SYN flood is a form of denial-of-service attack in which an attacker sends a succession of SYN requests to a target's system.

When a client attempts to start a TCP connection to a server, the client and server exchange a series of messages which normally runs
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