Nationality American Website www.grc.com | Name Steve Gibson Role Software Engineer | |
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Born March 26, 1955 (age 69) ( 1955-03-26 ) Occupation Software engineer and security analyst Education | ||
Steven "Steve" Gibson (born 26 March 1955) is an American software engineer, security researcher, and IT security proponent. In the early 1980s, Gibson worked on light pen technology for use with Apple and Atari systems. In 1985, he founded Gibson Research Corporation, best known for its SpinRite software.
Contents
Personal
Gibson started working on computers as a teenager, and got his first computing job with Stanford University's artificial intelligence lab when he was 15 years old. He studied electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley.
Career
Gibson was hired as a programmer for California Pacific Computer Company in 1980, where he worked on copy protection for the company's products.
Gibson founded Gibson Laboratories in Laguna Hills, California in 1981; Gibson Labs developed a light pen for the Apple II, Atari, and other platforms and went out of business in 1983.
In 1985 Gibson founded Gibson Research Corporation (GRC) - a computer software development firm.
From 1986 to 1993 Gibson wrote the "Tech Talk" column for InfoWorld magazine.
In 1999, Gibson created one of the first adware removal programs, which he called OptOut.
In 2001, Gibson predicted that Microsoft's implementation of the SOCK_RAW protocol in the initial release of Windows XP would lead to widespread chaos by making it easier for Windows XP users to create denial of service (DoS) attacks. In that year, his company's website was brought down by a DoS attack; the attacks continued for two weeks. Gibson blogged about the attacks and his (ultimately successful) efforts to track down the hacker. Three years after the Windows XP release, Microsoft limited raw socket support in Service Pack 2.
In 2005 Gibson launched a weekly podcast called "Security Now" with Leo Laporte on TWiT.tv, with its archives hosted on GRC's website.
In 2006 Gibson suggested that a bug, the Windows Metafile vulnerability, was actually a backdoor intentionally engineered into the system. The accusation spread through the internet as a rumor after the technology news website Slashdot picked up Gibson's suggestion. The rumor was subsequently refuted by Microsoft and by blogger Mark Russinovich, who stated that the bug appeared to be due to a coding error.
GRC products
GRC has created a number of utilities, most of which are freeware.