Steve Gibson

Gibson founded Gibson Research Corporation in 1985 and became known for the disk utility SpinRite and the web service ShieldsUP!, which port-scanned the visitor's own machine and taught a generation that Windows was sharing files with the whole internet. His OptOut from 2000 is often credited as the first anti-spyware program.

In 2001 grc.com was knocked offline by a DDoS from a thirteen-year-old, and Gibson's long write-up turned into a campaign against raw sockets in Windows XP. Security people rolled their eyes, but Microsoft restricted them in Service Pack 2 anyway. Since 2005 he has hosted Security Now with Leo Laporte. His explanations are thorough; his predictions have occasionally been more confident than correct.