I recently read a very interesting cybersecurity statistic, that has been boggling my mind ever since. ABC News recently recorded that "the amount of malicious emails have increased 600% as a result of COVID!"Does anyone else find this interesting as well as scary? I can't say I am particularly shocked about this, but at the same time, it still is quite alarming. As most of us may already know, there has been an increase in cybersecurity attacks, particularly ransomware ever since the pandemic began. This can be tied to a myriad of factors, all centered around the adjustments organizations have had to make in order to be able to continue work efficiency and productivity. Unfortunately, threat actors (hackers) have been working just as hard to break into organization systems - a fact I am all too familiar with it as a cybersecurity professional. A large majority of these attacks start with something as simple as an email.

I find this statistic particularly interesting, the reason being there are countless emails exchanged in the country daily, let alone monthly or even yearly. This leads to my questions

Question

• With a population size as large as this (population here being the emails), what type of sample and sampling method do you think was used in arriving at such statistics?We know every single email could not have been analyzed to come to a conclusion that 600% were malicious.
• Also, what type of errors do you think possibly exist within this statistic?I believe there would be a major case of coverage error/selection bias. What do you think?