For Good Measure: The Denominator

Let’s start with a recent paper that is very much worth your time to read: “Global Cyberspace Is Safer than You Think: Real Trends in Cybercrime” by Eric Jardine and released by Chatham House this past July [1]. Its message is exactly that given by its title: that cyberspace is getting better—not getting worse, that cyberspace is getting more safe—not getting more dangerous. The argument for that message is that thinking cyberspace is ever worse, ever more dangerous comes from failing to properly normalize whatever measures of safety you’ve heretofore been paying attention to. It is only fair to quote its front matter directly:

Information technology (IT) security firms such as Norton Symantec and Kaspersky Labs publish yearly reports that generally show the security of cyberspace to be poor and often getting worse. This paper argues that the level of security in cyberspace is actually far better than the picture described by media accounts and IT security reports. Currently, numbers on the occurrence of cybercrime are almost always depicted in either absolute (1,000 attacks per year) or as year-over-year percentage change terms (50 percent more attacks in 2014 than in 2013). To get an accurate picture of the security of cyberspace, cybercrime statistics need to be expressed as a proportion of the growing size of the Internet (similar to the routine practice of expressing crime as a proportion of a population, i.e., 15 murders per 1,000 people per year).…In particular, the absolute numbers tend to lead to one of three misrepresentations: first, the absolute numbers say things are getting worse, while the normalized numbers show that the situation is improving; second, both numbers show that things are improving, but the normalized numbers show that things are getting better at a faster rate; and third, both numbers say that things are getting worse, but the normalized numbers indicate that the situation is deteriorating more slowly than the absolute numbers. Overall, global cyberspace is actually far safer than commonly thought.