Mapping Cyber: Three Months of Global Discussion of Cyberattacks

In the latest addition to our map series using CartoDB, we plot all worldwide news coverage monitored by GDELT 2.0 from February 19, 2015 through June 2, 2015 that discusses cyber warfare, cyber attacks, data breaches, or another other issues relating to computer and online security.  Note that due to the ubiquity in discussion of cyber with respect to modern life, cyber is often mentioned in casual conversation and a tremendous amount of cyber mentions in the news are casual once-off mentions unrelated to the rest of the article.  Thus, here we require cyber to be discussed at least twice in the article – this considerably reduces casual mentions of cyber, but comes at the cost of missing other coverage.  You will still see a higher-than-usual false positive rate in the map below, including articles that do not appear to mention cyber at all, due to micro headline update inset bars not being properly removed from processing in all cases.  There is also a prevalence in certain regions of the world of machete attacks in which an individual being "hacked" was miscoded as a computer hacking attempt, resulting in false positives.  However, if you click around on the map below, you will find an incredible diversity in global discussion of cyber.

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