Article in ssrn electronic Journal · July 015 doi: 10. 2139/ssrn. 2634590 citations 32 reads 1,108 author: Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects

THE SIZE OF CYBERSPACE
The cyberspace ecosystem is built upon the physical 
infrastructure of the Internet and is basically composed of 
users, points of online interaction (websites, for instance) 
and the volume of activity that occurs online. The online 
ecosystem gets larger as the number of users, points of 
interaction and volume of activity increases. This section 
lays out a three-part framework for understanding the 
scope, size, width and breadth of cyberspace. Cyberspace 
is essentially an amalgamation of the number of users 
(people and devices, etc.), the number of points of 
interaction (websites and domains, etc.) and the activity 
linking these broad categories (data flows and commerce, 
etc.).
5
The basic point is that the ecosystem of cyberspace is big 
and getting a lot bigger at a fairly rapid pace. This growth 
is akin to the growth of a population in a city or country, 
in the sense that a fixed amount of crime and a growing 
population will result in a lower crime rate or a better 
chance that one will not be subject to a crime. 
As detailed below, data was collected from a variety of 
sources on the following variables for the concept of 
Internet users: 
• the number of Internet users;
• the number of email users;
4 Readers interested solely in the difference between absolute and 
normalized numbers, rather than the method of measuring these 
numbers, can skip ahead to the section “Trends in the Vectors of Attack: 
Vulnerabilities and Malicious Sites.” 
5 Studying cyberspace from an empirical perspective involves a bit of 
irony. While we live in the age of big data, where nearly everything a 
person does online is tracked and recorded, most of this information is 
proprietary and fragmented among numerous private actors. The result 
is that it is not easy to get a clear picture of either the size of the Internet 
or the occurrence of cybercrime. Data, therefore, have to be drawn from 
multiple sources and often estimates have to be used in place of actual 
figures. As a disclaimer: all the data used in this paper presents at best a