I saw Lisa Vaas‘ story Hyatt says 250 hotels were drained of credit card details and it has the usual recitation of the number of hotels, approximate number of countries.
Numbers that we all read by just nod by and they don’t make a real impression upon us.
How’s this for a restatement of the Hyatt hack’s impact:
Every country you see in green was subject to the Hyatt hack from August 13, 2015 until December 8, 2015.
Now are you impressed?
Compare that to the roughly 35K disgruntled people who compose the Islamic State:
(Originally from: https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=zDzQXfEc6tT8.k5aa_iAge_9E&hl=en)
That set of pins on little more than a dot is what all the hand wringing about the Islamic State is about.
At 35K members, the Islamic State doesn’t make up half of a good football crowd on any given Saturday.
Let’s use fewer numbers for hack reports and help make cybersecurity a priority.
BTW, I constructed the color map with Mapchart.net. It was actually quite nice.
PS: There were several small islands, such as Aruba that were included in the hacked countries but that did not appear on the Mapchart.net map.