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What the World Thinks of Steve Gibson

21 January 2006 03:46 UTC
A unanimous appraisal.

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 has a bad track record: a history of latching onto arcane issues that he doesn't fully understand and can never prove, and converting his limited understanding into fodder for the next internet melt-down.
 - Thomas C Greene

The WMF backdoor very much in keeping with Gibson's history of getting security matters a bit wrong, filling the gaps in his understanding with technobabble, and hyping the actual matter out of all reasonable proportion in his neverending quest of ink.
 - Thomas C Greene

Microsoft should have held a press conference just to say 'Just remember, everyone, that this is Steve Gibson we're talking about. Steve Gibson everyone! Steve fucking Gibson!' And then everyone could laugh, heartily pat each other on the back, and get on with more important things like taking no notice of Steve fucking Gibson.
 - sdk

With legitimate security advice people should listening to, the last thing we need are FUD peddlers like Gibson mudding the waters with crap like this.
 - Noober

Steve Gibson is a great example of what happens when an idiot mistakenly thinks he's smart, then grows an ego.
 - FunkTron

The guy is a moron.
 - Akula

Steve Gibson has a record for speaking shit and should be spurned as one would spurn a rabid dog.
 - sdk

Anyone who knows anything about computer security knows that Steve Gibson is Chicken Little, and that he does it for his own publicity.
 - Incarnate

Gibson is a sensationalist fear monger, end of story.
 - Xavin

His tools provide a false-sense of security.
 - Xavin

Steve Gibson is an idiot. Any credence placed in any of his statements is a grave mistake on the part of the listener.
 - TheGooseyOne

He is going to write an application for Windows (pre-2000) that will use raw sockets. Yet he pretends this is difficult so he can say Microsoft is making it easy for malicious attackers on XP. My head is starting to hurt.
 - weld

That guy makes my brain hurt. I don't think I've ever met anyone 'in the know' that doesn't laugh about Gibson.
 - Marc Maiffret

It's about time somone started calling 'bullocks' on Gibson. Everything I've read by Gibson has amounted to hype - at best (for worse, read his NanoProbe page, or his Project-X page). What's remarkable is that I had colleagues that actually characterized this chump as a 'scientist'.
 - munge

The man is seriously nuts.
 - Eric Means

Gibson is clearly a man possessed. I am not going to pretend I really understand the whole technical issue but the use of them giant fonts was enough for me.
 - Paul J

Gibson is completely touting his own horn.
 - Glenn Hunt

He's a loop.
 - Ant

He has technical knowledge gaps you could drive a supertanker through.
 - Arley Dealey

His style of sensationalism and not inviting peer review regarding his criticism of Black Ice Defender signify a mind that is under incredible durress and that is not fit to be writing a scholarly paper.
 - Kurt Östreich

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.
 - Not Signed

The man is clearly delusional.
 - Tristan

Having had to talk a helldesk monkey with an MCSE through using DOS FTP the other day, I'm beginning to wish I had never gone down the official certification route. Perhaps I'm tainted by association.
 - Dan

Gibson is really showing his true colors as being a truly expert, highly-trained, totally legitimate knucklehead looking for his 15 minutes of fame to fuel his otherwise miniscule ego.
 - RF

Steve Gibson. What an idiot.
 - Roger

He dares to call it 'GENESIS' (Gibson's ENcryption-Enhanced Spoofing Immunity System). He dares to call it 'Beautiful and Perfect.' It's the product of 'Three Key Innovations' for which he takes credit and which culminate in an 'Encrypted Token,' which is another way of saying a 'SYNcookie', a quite useful thing developed by Dan Bernstein and Eric Schenk back in 1996.
 - Thomas C Greene

Steve Gibson jumped on the bandwagon with a page dedicated to saturating the issue with his own special blend of FUD that is almost elevated to an art form. In a complete exit from anything security related, Gibson goes as far as to charge Microsoft with purposefully withholding an advisory and patch for this vulnerability so that Christmas sales would not be affected.
 - Tim Mullen

The development of the application and its method of identifying the client IP address is quite insecure. As a result, ShieldsUp! allows the web user to perform a port scan against any other machine on the Internet and return the results to the web user. The remote system will log the scan as having originated from one of Steve Gibson's machines.
 - Bugtraq

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

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