Bonnie & Clyde on Steve Gibson

August 6, 2001 12:04 PM UTC
The hacker duo connected with the previous plunder of GRC.com have come out of the woodwork - sort of. They agreed to an online interview in the course of which they handed over more damning evidence against self-presumed security expert Steve Gibson.

'Gibson is an expert at whatever his sugar daddies say he is.'

Steve Gibson's success, say Bonnie and Clyde, is due to a single fact: that there are people out there dumber than he is. Not everyone knows where to go to get qualified information, and Gibson's goofy HTML style appeals to the simple minded. These people have an innate trust which Gibson exploits ruthlessly.

'Gibson is run by sugar daddies,' claims Clyde. 'Unscrupulous people with a product to sell. This kind of behaviour is more common on the Internet than you imagine.'

Bonnie and Clyde claim to have a background in journalism and to have knocked heads with Gibson years ago. They learned then how the Steve Gibson business works.

'He's a very seasoned journalist,' says Bonnie. 'He knows his craft very well. Unfortunately, he's turned his skills to unethical purposes.'

'Gibson picks up his tech savvy as he goes along and seems to have learned a bit of his way around x86 assembler and security basics, but he's no computer pro by any stretch of the imagination,' says Clyde.

'He's a journalist and not a computer scientist, but common people on the Internet have no way of knowing this, and that is what he counts on.'

Wizmo?

Bonnie and Clyde also sent radsoft.net a brand spanking new GRC application never before seen by the public - straight off the GRC servers again, right under the nose of security expert Steve Gibson who Bonnie and Clyde claim can't even see it happening.

The application is called Wizmo, or Steve Gibson's Windows Gizmo, which Gibson describes as a 'tight, tiny, single-click Windows miscellaneous power user command executor' [sick].

All Wizmo does is turn off your computer, either by running a screen saver and responding to the Windows message WM_POWER, or by calling the APIs AdjustTokenPrivileges and ExitWindowsEx. The built-in screen saver is a DirectDraw application called 'Graviton' and is a bunch of mothball-like spermatozoa squiggling around your screen - Gibson's favourite between meals snack.

'We can go in at any time and take what we want.'

'Gibson claims anyone else would have made Wizmo obscenely fat but that's exactly what he has done,' says Clyde. 'The app seems to be only 33KB but that's because the coward packed it - unpack it and it's a pathetic amateurish monster.'

'We can go in at any time and take what we want,' says Bonnie. 'It's just that there's not a lot worthwhile to take. Even script kiddies can have more interesting disks.'

'I don't think we're the only ones who go in there either. His system is wide open.'

Note: radsoft.net neither condones or encourages intrusion. The data - in particular the Wizmo application - sent to radsoft.net was not sent at the behest of radsoft.net and has since been destroyed. The identities of 'Bonnie & Clyde' are unknown.