Steve Gibson
Software developer and security researcher who founded Gibson Research Corporation, maker of the SpinRite disk maintenance and recovery utility and the ShieldsU...
“This means that my saying, as I did last week, that GRC would be a low-interest target really doesn't fly, because the threshold required for interest has been lowered to the floor, so that no one is low interest any longer.”
Security Now · Software Engineering & Infra · November 2026
Context
Gibson had just read a listener's account of his 30-person startup being hacked, apparently by an internet-wide automated scan with AI digging into the services it found. He uses it to revise his earlier claim that his own company would not be worth attacking.
Transcript
…knowledge that we have into language, which we have long recorded, right? On cave walls, stone tablets, parchment, and now in books, and actually now in LLMs. So, what happened during the past few years is that we finally figured out how to encode and record that same knowledge in neural networks.
…comes from us? Or is it enough that our observation of said, because otherwise, how could the author that wrote their book, how would they be able to have that knowledge if it wasn't from getting it through information elsewhere? And if that's the case, then upon observation, it becomes knowledge.
And that's my point. I mean, I can see Guillermo's, I can see the point he wants to make and the position he takes. For me, I don't think I will change my way of thinking about it or expressing it. You know, a book, if I say that a book contains knowledge, to me, that feels right because that's what I obtain. And I mean, entertainment and humor and emotion. I mean, it contains a lot of stuff, right? Yes. It can impart knowledge. So I think it contains that knowledge that it's imparting. And it contains the humor that's imparting and the emotional affect that it is imparting. So, you know, we're affected by those things because they're in there. Right. Yeah, and they are expressed in and encoded into language. But that's knowledge that is in there that is in the book, I think. So Jordan B. So Jordan used his full name and did not ask me to obscure his identity, but it kind of felt like the right thing to do. Just because for propriety's sake, he gave his email, which I received last Tuesday morning, the…
made that it's good that it happened while they were a small business and not a large business. And better now than later. Yeah. Yeah, when there was much
more, much more to lose.
Exactly. And be fined for.
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