Learning
This project taught me how to balance exploration with storytelling. I learned how to build a narrative from simple to complex, guiding the audience step by step. I also deepened my skills with event-driven datasets, where frequency, not continuity, is the key dimension. Working with Bitsight pushed me to connect analysis with business communication needs—not just asking “what does the data say?” but also “how do we present this so it resonates with stakeholders?” Finally, building barcode charts (including small multiples and interactivity) expanded my technical toolkit in D3.
Impact
The visualisation became a communication piece for Bitsight, giving them a powerful way to present breach trends to clients and position themselves as experts in cybersecurity risk. By combining analytical rigor with storytelling design, the project helped transform a raw dataset into a compelling narrative.
Challenge
The first challenge was data scope and filtering. Deciding to limit the dataset to US incidents, and which years to include, was not trivial, as every choice affects the story. Another challenge was finding the right visualisation type given the lack of continuous numerical variables. The barcode chart turned out to be the right solution, but it took iterations to arrive there. A third challenge was ensuring the project worked as a client-facing storytelling tool, not just an analysis, which meant extra focus on clarity, interactivity, and usability.
Description
This client project revolved around a dataset of global data breaches. The task was open-ended: the client gave me freedom to decide how to filter, structure, and visualize the data, which meant I had to take responsibility for all analytical and design decisions.
During my exploratory data analysis, I realized that the dataset included many countries, but data quality was robust only for the United States. After proposing this to the client, I focused on the US subset and a reliable timeframe. Because data breaches are event-based—they either happen or not—this dataset resembled my work on natural disasters, where frequency was the most important variable. The only additional numerical indicator was severity, a risk score that could be used as a color encoding.
The final visualization narrative was carefully structured:
1. A simple line chart showing the total number of breaches over time.
2. A matrix view comparing sectors and types.
3. A barcode chart showing all breaches as discrete events.
4. An interactive small-multiple barcode chart, allowing users to filter by category or sector and compare frequency and severity side by side.
This progression built up from basic temporal trends to a rich interactive story. Tooltips and interactivity were added to provide depth without overwhelming the main patterns.
Topics
Cybersecurity, data breaches · Barcode chart · Small multiples · Interactive storytelling · Severity encoding
Tools
HTML, CSS, JS, d3.js, arquero.js, plot.js
Year
2023
Clients
Bitsight
