Steve Gibson

This person has Assburgers Syndrome,
so you can't say anything bad! :-(

Be aware of that, you insensitive fuck.

Steve Gibson is a self-proclaimed security expert and scam artist responsible for such great products as ZoneAlarm, SpinRite and the ShieldsUp portscanner. He is hated by the entire security industry for many acts of IRL Trolling and being a major lolcow with delusions of competence. Despite his claims that he's a major security expert he has written only one program and decided to build his credit on lies so blatant that it actually took a while to figure out that he is, in fact, a nobody. His pet website grc.com is a super sikrit HQ of gif images, frames and points made in horrible gigantic colorful font to appear more knowledgable to the ignorant masses

Say what you want, but he rocks that pedo stache hard.

This is what the first version of the website looked like minus the sarcastic comments.

SpinRite

This is the only program he actually wrote and serves as his main source of revenue along with bullshit and shameless self promotion. It's basically a tool with functionality similar to the DOS command undelete and various superior open source tools, but your mom will pay for it, because computers are hard. He claims it will restore faulty data and refreshen the fucking magnets on your harddrive. Srsly, we're not making this shit up. Oh wait, [1] this one is a scam too, what a surprise.

Street Cred

One day steve decided that learning about raw sockets made him a hacker even though none of the cool kids have heard of him before. He made no contributions on any of the major security websites, and people for the most part ignored him. That is, until he went on a batshit insane rampage to claim Microsoft put a backdoor into Windows when he tried to fix the WMF vulnerability, while in fact it was an intentional design flaw that was meant to allow cancelling print jobs.

	“	Gibson takes his preferred route to getting the ink that he craves: technobabble and innuendo. He can't prove anything (technically, he hasn't got the chops), so he lurks in the gray area between fact and fiction, and generates torrents of fear, uncertainty, and doubt.	„
	— Thomas C Greene

	“	Gibson is a charlatan whose 'research' is written for clueless media reporters (for press attention) and the teeming masses of internet newbies (to whom he sells various products). His 'findings' are not new, are always filled with massive hyperbole, and are frequently completely false. Instead of presenting evidence to prove his points, he tends to just state them using goofy blue or green fonts as if that somehow adds credibility.	„
	—Fyodor

	“	Actually, he's not a security expert. He gained much success with his optout program (which he never even finished) and was able to write hype very well and still is. But that is it, his leaktest and sheildsup tests are fatally flawed and produce either a false sense of security or a mass of confusions. The tests are very basic and simple. I don't recall anything he's ever done that would qualify him as an 'EXPERT' in security. Only an expert at hype and false promises to finish anything he starts. Seems that he runs a popular news server and takes advantage of his audience, who by the best of my knowledge are comprised of really unknowing people and the media ready to cover a story.	„
	—Anonymous

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ZoneAlarm

As all Asperger's victims, Steve never learned anything from becoming the laughing stock of the whole IT industry, because he also tried to discredit Intruded Detection Systems in favor of ZoneAlarm, in which he had a significant share. He also has strong ties with Mcafee which they deny but silently approve of his actions as a sockpuppet to lull retards into a false sense of security and give them moar Jew gold.

This is when they just lost it and decided to scam overtly.

GENESIS

The Gibson's ENcryption-Enhanced Spoofing Immunity System was supposed to be the ultimate "Beautiful and Perfect" tool to avoid all synfloods, while in fact it was just a way of reimplementing SYNcookies, developped and implemented 6 years earlier by Dan Bernstein and Eric Schenk. Except his implementation was dangerously broken. Some researchers stated that Gibson's approach was worse than no SYN protection at all. Basically his cookies never expire, so if you sniff one cookie you can then spoof the connection and flood away while the victim sits in Steve's broken condom and complains that their latest MS Word e-mail forward is taking long to send.

Christmas of Death

Year 2001, war was beginning. With the advent of Windows XP and Microsoft finally adding support for raw sockets to their codebase. Steve was sitting at home, all alone, and wanted some attention. Instead of buying a Fleshlight he decided that he will proclaim himself the harbringer of doom and point out something noone else no matter how qualified would dare to put into question. Yes, introducing raw sockets in Windows would lead to Catnarok and the complete and utter destruction of Windows PCs by Linux machines.

ShieldsUp

This web-based port scanner is still probably among the top results when you enter "port xxx" into Google or another search engine. Not only does it scream in huge blue font that your machine is BROADCASTING AN IP ADDRESS but that it's only secure when it doesn't respond to ping and ignores all requests on all ports. What is even moar lulz is that it uses a shitty hashing algorithm to store information on what IP to scan and can be easily spoofed to perform a remote scan on any IP address of your choosing. Oh, and it doesn't report NetBios shares when they are secured with The super sikrit $ prefix.