Steve Gibson (computer programmer)

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Steve Gibson

Steve in between shots on Leo Laporte's Call For Help in Toronto April, 2007.
Born March 1955 (1955-03)
Dayton, Ohio, United States
Residence Laguna Hills, California
USA
Nationality American
Education EECS at UC Berkeley
Occupation Software Engineer and
Security Analyst
Known for Security Now! audio podcast on TWiT.tv (network)
Title Computer Programmer
Website
GRC.com

Steve Gibson (born March 1955, Dayton Ohio) is a computer enthusiast, software engineer and security researcher who studied EECS at the UC Berkeley. Gibson currently lives in Laguna Hills, California. In 1985, Gibson founded Gibson Research Corporation, which is most well known for its SpinRite software.

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[edit] Works

Gibson has had a very long career in the technology field - his resume lists jobs he had held back to the age of 13 [1]. He began in hardware projects but moved more towards software development in the 1980s. One of his early successes during this period was a light pen graphics system for the Apple II.

Gibson is an advocate of assembly language programming, and prides himself on writing smaller applications mostly in Intel x86 assembly language, including much of the code of the SpinRite hard disk utility used at the beginning of the PC era. 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 publically released work is SecurAble, which is a program that will tell the user if their CPU supports 64 bit computing, DEP (Data Execution Prevention) and hardware level virtualisation.

Gibson is currently working on DNS Benchmark, which is a utility used for DNS nameserver performance characterisation and profiling, and the DNS Nameserver Spoofability Test which is an online utility used to test whether the systems configured nameservers are vulnerable to DNS spoofing.

Once DNS Benchmark is complete, Gibson will begin work on his forthcoming VPN product CryptoLink.

[edit] 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[2]. 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.

As of mid 2009 GRC has four employees; Steve Gibson, Greg (Technical Support), Sue (Book-keeper) and Elaine (Audio Transcriber). Gibson also founded Gibson Laboratories, Inc. in 1981, a predecessor to GRC[1].

[edit] Media

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

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

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

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