I’ve been banned by the BBC!

Graham Cluley
Graham Cluley
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 @grahamcluley.com
 / grahamcluley

Mark Perrow, the executive producer of the controversial BBC Click documentary about botnets, published his justification for the programme on the BBC website.

It’s well worth reading if you’re interested in understanding the BBC’s opinion, and checking out other people’s responses, as rather nicely they also gave people the ability to leave comments. And so, naturally, I did.

Anyroad, I just received an email from the BBC website.

BBC email to Graham Cluley

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At first I thought there was a mistake, but sure enough my response to Mark’s post has been removed from the BBC site by its moderators.

Comment removed from BBC website

This baffled me a little as I couldn’t remember being racist, sexist, homophobic or any of those other things in my posting.

I can’t find anyway to appeal to the BBC’s moderators to reconsider, and I’m somewhat in the dark as to what in particular they didn’t want their visitors to read. If anyone has any ideas, please let me know.

Censored by the BBC website's moderators

Fortunately, it seems the ban is only from talking about this subject as BBC News Online is linking to the Clu-blog about the Natasha Richardson scareware attack this morning.

Which is nice of them, as I love the BBC. I think they’re terrific and wouldn’t want to think that I’ve upset them.

Anyway, there’s more important things to worry about than the BBC’s bonkers botnet experiment. Let’s move on.


Graham Cluley is an award-winning keynote speaker who has given presentations around the world about cybersecurity, hackers, and online privacy. A veteran of the computer security industry since the early 1990s, he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows, makes regular media appearances, and hosts the popular "Smashing Security" podcast. Follow him on LinkedIn, Bluesky and Mastodon, or drop him an email.

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