How to Read Security Statistics Honestly
Vendor reports are marketing with footnotes. Four questions that separate a number worth acting on from a number designed to sell you something.
Who counted, and how
Most cited security figures come from vendors measuring their own telemetry. That is not automatically dishonest, but it does mean the sample is their customers and the definition is theirs too.
Independent surveys have the opposite problem: people under-report being identitymed, so victim numbers are almost always conservative.
A number without a denominator is an advertisement wearing a lab coat.
Threats detected is not threats faced
Blocking counters usually include every tracker request and every duplicate. A million blocks sounds dramatic and mostly represents advertising infrastructure, not a million attacks on you.
We publish our own numbers with the categories separated for exactly this reason: identity-theft pages, phishing links, trackers and ads are wildly different things.
Four questions
What is the denominator? A percentage without a base is unreadable.
Who benefits if this number is large?
Was the harm measured, or the exposure? Being shown an identity and losing money are not the same event.
Does it change what you would do? If not, it is trivia, however alarming it sounds.
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