David Harley

These days I'm retired from the security industry and spend most of my time on music and other writing (songs, verse, historical research, miscellaneous prose). I have a number of albums available on Bandcamp and my main blog currently is the (Un)Selective Symmetry page on Substack. I've also started writing books again, but they're mostly on music and/or history rather than security. The Vanes Of Shrewsbury is a collection of the drawings of buildings in Shrewsbury by Eddie Parker, with historical and personal commentary (and additional artwork) by me. Introduction To Nashville Tuning For Guitar is what it says in the title: a textbook on the history and use of Nashville Tuning and related techniques for coaxing a very different tone out of a guitar. I've also contributed verse to Volume 8 of The Book Of Lived and published a second edition of my 1980s verse collection Suite in Four Flats (and a Maisonette). 'So Sound You Sleep' is based on some of my songs and settings, especially those with a Shropshire connection. 'Hands of the Craftsman' is based on mymaterial for a 1980s revue. I returned, sort of, to security for 'Sins & Insensitivities', a collection of writings about Facebook. (If your name is Zuckerberg, you probably won't want to read that one.) 'Pension Pensées' is a bizarre collection of anecdotes, quips, photographs and even one or two not-very-accomplished cartoons, many of which originally appeared on my Dataholics blog. Right now I'm working on a musical collaboration, but there will, if you're really lucky (ahem...), be more books after that.

But going back to my pre-retirement writing...

I was a late starter (1986) as an IT professional, beginning at the Royal Free Hospital, then with the Human Genome Project (1989), then at Imperial Cancer Research Fund (1991-2001), where I wrote/co-wrote/edited a number of Internet FAQs and my first articles on programming and security for various publications. (If you're really fascinated by my security career, there's a Wikipedia page that seems reasonably accurate.)

I presented my first conference papers in 1997 (at Virus Bulletin and SANS). In 2001 Osborne/McGraw-Hill published Viruses Revealed (co-written with Robert Slade and Urs Gattiker): VR and the later AVIEN Malware Defense Guide (Syngress) are probably the best known of my books. Other security books to which I've contributed include OS X Exploits and Defense, The Computer Security Handbook, Maximum Security (3rd & 4th Editions), The Handbook of Information Security, The Handbook of Computer Networks, and Windows NT Security Step by Step.

In 2006 I left the NHS to work as a freelance author/consultant in 2006, which is also when I began to work with ESET. Primarily, I was an author and blogger, editor, conference speaker, and commentator on a wide range of security issues. I suspect I may still hold the record for the number of papers I've written for Virus Bulletin, but it's unlikely that there'll be any more. However, I do have a few security book projects in mind.