Can you handle the hype? (grc.com)

Member Name: Retron

Product:	grc.com
Date:	01/08/01 (53 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Some handy firewall testing utilities

Disadvantages: Hype - lots of it, Completely over the top warnings

Grc.com is the homepage of Steve Gibson, a famous security guru. As well as adverts for SpinRite (a hard drive diagnostics tool), there are several utilities to test your firewall (if you're using one).

These are written in Assembly, so are really small and quick to download. They pass your IP address to grc.com, which then probes your computer to see if you've got any open ports which could be a security risk.

Until a few months ago, that was all the site was about (well, there are a few other things on there such as demonstration of ClearType, which makes text look better on LCD displays). Recently, though, Steve's worked himself into a frenzy over Windows XP, which includes 'raw sockets'. This means that people can launch attacks on other computers by faking packets, which cannot be traced. It's been around in UNIX/Linux since time immemorial, and in Windows 2000, but until now it hasn't been possible to create raw sockets in the most popular version of Windows, Win9x/ME. Steve predicts Armegeddon once everyone's running XP, with any Trojan that gets run by anybody being able to send out anonymous data packets - Steve predicts an Internet catastrophy.

This has been really divisive, with some people saying Microsoft have gone too far in actually following the standard (Win9x's sockets implementation was non standard; broken in effect), while others say it's a big fuss over nothing (and that you can get raw sockets by installing software on Win9x any way). Personally, I agree with the 'load of hype over nothing' folks - indeed, grc.com is the subject of several anti-grc sites, which give the other side of Steve's arguments. Around this time, Steve suffered badly at the hands of 'script kiddies', which made him take his site offline several times.

More topical still, Steve predicted a huge amount of disruption from Code Red, the worm which he said would clog systems all
over the world this morning. At the time of writing, nothing much has happened - it seems that people had installed the patch from Microsoft that fixes the issue (and again, it's been blown out of all proportion as only Web servers running IIS are affected - i.e. not the vast majority of people).

Sadly, I can no longer recommend grc.com due to Steve's over-hyping of current events. I'd change my opinion if all Hell did break loose, but based on past experience (and an article he wrote 9 years ago claiming there would soon be virii that would be unstoppable) I'd say he's making a mountain out of a pimple.

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