Graham Cluley

Graham Cluley (born 8 April 1969) is a British security blogger and the author of grahamcluley.com, a daily blog on the latest computer security news, opinion, and advice.

Cluley started his career in the computer security industry as a programmer at British anti-virus firm S&S International (later known as Dr Solomon's Software), where he wrote the first Windows version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit.

From 1999 to 2013, Cluley was a Senior Technology Consultant at Sophos and also acted as the Head of Corporate Communications, spokesperson and editor of Sophos's Naked Security site.

In 2009 and 2010, Computer Weekly named Cluley Twitter user of the year.

In April 2011, Cluley was inducted into the InfoSecurity Europe Hall of Fame.

Graham Cluley and Carole Theriault are the co-hosts of the weekly Smashing Security podcast.

His war of words with the virus-writer 'Gigabyte' generated an amount of media attention in its own right.

Public speaking

Cluley has given talks about computer security for some of the world's largest companies, worked with law enforcement agencies on investigations into hacking groups, and regularly appears on TV and radio explaining computer security threats.

Computer games Before entering the computer security industry, Cluley achieved notoriety for two interactive fiction PC games: Jacaranda Jim (1987) and Humbug (1990). Both games were independently distributed as shareware, with Cluley advertising in computer magazines and sending them out on 3½ and 5¼-inch disks. As an incentive, tips and maps were sent out to players who had sent in their registration fees. Both were praised as "shareware masterpieces" in PC Review. Cluley later entered his games into the public domain, and they are now available for download or in-browser play from his website.

Jacaranda Jim Cluley wrote Jacaranda Jim while studying computing at Guildford College of Technology. He began developing the game in 1987, borrowing liberally from an earlier unreleased game named Herbie. The game "took about 6 months to write, and was finished by April 1988". The game, which was written in Pascal, was then ported to the PC platform with the help of Alex Bull, another student at Guildford.

A sequel called The Case of Spindle's Crotchet was planned and partially completed, but never released. Some of the content from this game, including "a lot of ideas and jokes," were included in Cluley's next game, Humbug. A quite extensive review of Humbug was written in 2018 by Joe Pranevich on The Adventure Gamer. Pranevich noted that the game has "more charm than it has any right to have," but that "it's also quite difficult".

Later games Cluley went on to produce two graphical games: a Tetris clone called Blox (1990) and a Pacman-based game called Wibbling Wilf (1991).