The frequency, size and types of cyber attacks have substantially increased across the globe since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Michelle Zatlyn, co-founder and COO of web-security company Cloudflare. In a conference call with The Logic’s editor-in-chief David Skok, Saskatchewan native Zatlyn emphasized that the targets of these attacks were most often employees working from home, given how insecure networks at home are compared to in the office. (The Logic)

Talking point: San-Francisco-based Cloudflare is one of the biggest networks on the internet; it has roughly 27 million internet properties and last year stopped 72 billion cyber attacks daily. The company also tracks internet traffic, and found that Canadian internet traffic was up 40 per cent in mid-May from the start of the year. Internet traffic globally increased by 50 per cent in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic. “You think about the internet all of a sudden being able to handle 50 percent more traffic, and it did so pretty flawlessly, which I credit to the computer scientists and technologists who made the internet, and then all the cloud companies helping make it run today,” Zatlyn said.