Denial of service attack (DDOS) attacks are a kind of cyber-attacks. Customers in Industries like Finance, Insurance, Retail are often a target of such DDOS attacks. A machine or a network resource in such attacks is made unavailable for the user. Cyber security companies offer solutions to counter such attacks. This dashboard talks about how DDOS attacks affected UK in 2012
What I like about this visualization
- I believe the claim of the visualization is pretty clear, where the type of businesses affected, the attacks penetration, and current weak offerings are shown. This intuitively points towards need of a better solution.
- Audience for this dashboard I believe are institutions in UK in areas like finance, insurance, retail etc. If presented to such audience, a fairly right message comes across from the visualization. The subtle next steps suggested with the visualization would make the audience aware of the situation of DDOS attacks in UK market in general and prompt them to go back and access risks in their network.
Things I don’t like about the visualization and Improvements
- Facts (Actual Numbers) are Incomplete : On closer look, one of the flaws in this visualization is that it talks about percentages but does not give idea about how many institutions or individuals were interviewed/reviewed for this analysis. For example: It says 1 in 5 organizations experience DDOS attacks.
How can it look better – If the base number (number of people/institutions interviewed) for this statistic is mentioned then it gives a better picture of severity.
- Flow and Story from the Data: Though the data depicted is relevant, the flow of data could have been show better.
How can it look better –
How Many organizations were attacked? This should just give out numbers instead of the pie charts. There is no need of pie charts to show how many organizations were attacked. The big reveal using numbers would intrigue users to dig further.
Which industries stand to lose? Instead of pie charts, having a bar chart giving out absolute numbers (number of individuals/ companies) instead of percentages would give a clear picture on numbers. Having this graph would bring out comparison between the telecom and Finance industry numbers and give a quick and clear picture of how much Value and how many people stand to lose in these industries
- Need of Multiple data sources – Additional graph shown below could be combined with the existing information to give a more complete picture money lost in different industries.
(Found below visualization with gives insights into the UK DDOS attacks in UK for year 2012 for different industries)
Based on the above points, a revised version of this graph is seen here – https://drive.google.com/a/scu.edu/file/d/0Bzau8FgD0T1Aa0xhSVJvUDdZR3M/view?usp=sharing
** Absolute numbers in the above chart are assumed since those numbers are unavailable.
Sources:
https://www.neustar.biz/enterprise/img/resource-center/assets/uk-ddos-2012-003.png