Top 5 Must Track Cybersecurity KPIs & Metrics
It is impossible to manage what you can’t calculate. With cyber threats always growing and becoming more difficult to identify, you must have methods in place to assess, record, and compare the efficacy of your cybersecurity efforts. Cybersecurity benchmarking is an important approach to maintain track of your security activities. Cybersecurity metrics and KPIs are critical, real-time indicators that assist security teams examine how their security measures perform over time.
Importance of Cybersecurity KPIs & Metrics
- Cybersecurity Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) provide insightful data that demonstrate the effectiveness of security management while assisting in crucial decisions to optimize the organization’s cybersecurity strategy. KPIs are critical to cyber security efforts since they provide useful insights that enable the firm attain its long-term objectives.
- Cybersecurity metrics provide quantifiable values that reflect the layer of safety and privacy delivered by the organization’s security procedures. Although these metrics vary depending on the use case, they are often determined by several security parameters such as the incidents reported, incident diagnosis time, incident resolution time, and changes in the number of incidents. With cybersecurity metrics in place, the security department can track and assess progress very efficiently.
Every modern corporate strategy now includes cybersecurity as a crucial component, with key stakeholders seeking to justify security expenses and the return on security expenditures. Any firm that wants to monitor, evaluate, and enhance security must use cybersecurity metrics & KPI analysis to follow the evolving threat landscape.
In addition to learning about a number of important indicators for benchmarking cybersecurity, this article emphasizes the usefulness of metrics and KPIs in running complete security programs.
1. Mean Time Measurement (MTM)
This is the name given to the measurements that factor in mean time with security processes of incident management situations. There are 3 types:
Mean Time To Detect (MTTD)
MTTD quantifies the security team’s understanding of security risk indicators by describing the typical amount of time that cybersecurity events go unreported. It reflects security awareness and measures the time it takes for your organization’s security systems to notice a threat.
Mean Time To Respond (MTTR)
MTTR measures the average time it takes the intrusion detection system to accurately eliminate a security threat. The MTTR measure also assists in calculating how long it takes the security division to respond to an attack and restore the system to a reliable operational state.
Mean Time To Contain (MTTC)
The time required to resolve an attack and patch up vulnerable areas that aided the assault is defined by MTTC. Companies must be aware of the mean time to contain of a cyber-attack so that issues such as system outage or others do not lead to significant damage. This will also allow organizations to develop a quick strategy for dealing with the aftermath of a cyber assault.
The cost of a breach is significantly impacted by subpar performance in MTTD, MTTR, and MTTC. These two KPIs should be your top priorities when gauging information security. It’s a useful KPI for CISOs to track and present to their board in order to make long-term progress.
2. Third Party Access
The use of Third-Party Access metrics can shed light on possible dangers that may be posed to internal systems by a variety of external organizations, such as third-party vendor apps and APIs.
Although these organizations provide essential services for managing consumer data, processing financial data, and running businesses, they frequently have privileged access to common application resources.
An assessment of the vulnerabilities introduced by such businesses and the consequences of a cybersecurity breach based on these vulnerabilities is provided by a third-party risk metric.
3. Number of Unidentified Devices
One of the most used cybersecurity KPIs is searching for and labelling unidentified devices on the company’s internal network. External devices that are incorporated into a company’s network pose a huge danger since they may bring malware and other security risks into the corporate network. To maintain a strong security posture, security teams may fine-tune their penetration testing and vulnerability screening by tagging every device connected to the network, even the unidentified ones.
4. Intrusion Attempts
This indicator provides insight into current vulnerabilities as well as the readiness of different security mechanisms and reaction teams. Since attackers prefer to use security flaws as an entry point, a high number of intrusion attempts often indicates a big attack surface. Teams may check firewall and traffic logs to see how many times attackers have attempted to hack the systems, how many of those attempts have succeeded, and where each assault originated. Security teams may make educated judgments about systems for intrusion detection and security hardening practices using the attack threat simulations and frequency data.
5. Patching Cadence
Patch cadence is a metric for reducing the number of major vulnerabilities that have not yet been fixed as well as the list of known vulnerabilities in the organization’s internal system.
Patching cadence is a critical KPI to track since hackers frequently take advantage of the delay between a patch release and installation. Because of the shifting nature of the cyber security threat landscape, it enables cybersecurity teams to implement security measures. The process also aids in determining how frequently the company changes its internal systems and conducts system evaluations to handle cyberthreats.
Even non-technical board members are aware that when vulnerabilities are found, business-critical software needs to be patched right away. Showing data that demonstrates how rapidly operating systems, tools, and apps are fixed after patch release dates demonstrates your knowledge of the most recent security flaws.
Choosing the Right KPI
There is no definitive set of cybersecurity KPIs that all companies must monitor. The metrics you select should be largely influenced by the requirements and risk tolerance of your firm. You should always pick KPIs that are obvious to non-technical stakeholders as well as anybody else who looks at your reports. Your non-technical coworkers should be able to grasp them without calling you for clarification, according to a decent rule of thumb. Therefore, you should steer clear of KPIs with a wide margin for error and arcane measurements that your non-technical colleagues may not understand.
Outsourcing cybersecurity services and using sophisticated protection and monitoring technology can help ensure that your security strategy is sound and that your customers’ data is safe, while allowing your own personnel to concentrate on other business matters.
Our team at Caplock Security is made up of devoted security professionals with years of experience in a variety of cybersecurity fields. Several of our clients have already used our assistance to improve their security standards, compliance requirements, and lower their risk. Our professionals can assist you in locating your security vulnerabilities and offer advice on how to fix them effectively.