What Are Cybersecurity Metrics?
Cybersecurity metrics help organizations set performance goals, measure the efficacy of existing security controls, and ultimately drive a net positive ROI of cybersecurity investments. These metrics can provide visibility into organizational readiness for a possible attack, its potential financial impact, and the costs involved with mitigation steps.
In this blog, we’ll define 13 crucial KPIs and metrics that have a significant contribution to your cybersecurity ROI.
Why Are Cybersecurity Metrics Important?
Cybersecurity metrics can tell you everything you need to know about the effectiveness of your security posture, from threat detection and incident response times to overall resilience against emerging cyber threats. Having actionable data can help you make more informed business decisions, communicate risks better to the board, and act as benchmarks to track future performance and security posture progress.
Here are several use cases that highlight the importance of tracking cybersecurity metrics:
Better Communication with the C-Suite
CISOs are responsible for briefing the board on the organization’s security programs, risk exposure, and whether or not resources are being allocated correctly. Clear and quantifiable risk metrics show the board what’s working, what areas require improvement, and what they are getting for their cyber investment. This prevents wasting precious meeting minutes and losing the board’s attention by focusing on unnecessary details.
Compliance Reporting
Many of the cybersecurity metrics focus on areas that are relevant to compliance. Is sensitive data being handled correctly? If not, you might face severe penalties that can negatively impact your ability to secure future investments from management, not to mention putting you in the loss column on your balance sheets. Keeping track of your compliance can go a long way towards showing how much the company takes the issues seriously in any cases that might develop.
Data-Driven Decision Making
Tracking key metrics and KPIs helps you make more data-driven decisions and justify them. For example, which cybersecurity issues require immediate attention? Which security measures need immediate improvement? Are your incident response times meeting your objectives? Numbers tell the full story.
Cybersecurity metrics are also important for CISOs planning a budget or those entering a new role in an organization. This helps align strategies that demonstrate measurable progress to stakeholders and leadership.
13 Cybersecurity KPIs and Metrics to Track
1. Mean Time to Detect (MTTD)
MTTD is one of the most crucial cybersecurity KPIs to track. It measures the average time it takes for an organization to identify a security incident from the second it occurs. Research has shown that the average time to detect and contain a breach is 287 days. Whether it’s internal or external, is your incident response team prepared?
How to calculate MTTD:
Average time to detect a security incident / number of incidents
2. Mean Time to Acknowledge (MTTA)
This metric measures the average time it takes for an organization to acknowledge a security incident after it has been detected.
How to calculate MTTA:
Time to acknowledge all incidents / total number of incidents
Organizations should aim for a low MTTA, which suggests that the security team is ready to respond to potential threats as they occur.
3. Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR)
This metric describes how an organization recovers after an incident. Every second counts during a security incident, from initial discovery, to mitigation, to restoring business operations and continuity. Security teams must have incident response plans to limit the amount of data compromised or lost during an attack.
How to calculate MTTR:
Time to resolve each incident / total number of incidents
MTTR gives you clear insights into whether or not your incident response procedures are up-to-date, effective, and are correlated with the organization and its goals in an emergency. Many companies will set one of the MTTR goals to be business continuity throughout the event.
4. Mean Time to Contain (MTTC)
This metric addresses how an organization takes proactive steps to prevent the threat from causing further damage. From a cybersecurity ROI perspective, this translates to cost savings if the incident response plans are effective.
How to calculate MTTC:
Total # of incidents / time to contain each incident
5. Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF)
Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) measures the average time elapsed between two successive failures of a system or component. MTBF is also an indicator of the system’s reliability and performance over time. Tracking MTBF is important for preventing downtime. Research has shown that around 98% of organizations claim only one hour of downtime costs over $100,000.
How to calculate MTBF:
Total operational time / number of failures
6. Intrusion Attempts
Are your cybersecurity measures providing you with a strong line of defense? Intrusion attempts are a critical metric showing how easily an attacker can bypass your security measures, such as firewalls and Intrusion Detection System (IDS), and gain unauthorized access to your systems or networks. If an organization experiences a high volume of intrusion attempts, it might be time to reevaluate existing strategies.
7. Cost Per Incident
Simply put, how much does it cost to mitigate a security incident? The answer is more complicated than you think because you must factor in several components associated with remediating a security incident. This includes:
- Incident response and forensics teams
- Operational disruption
- Data restoration and recovery
- Legal and regulatory compliance fees
- Insurance premiums
- Upgrading existing security measures
It excludes external factors such as PR to mend customer and vendor relations, especially if that breach was public or in the news.
8. False Positive Rate
False positive rate (FPR) describes the ratio of alerts that are incorrectly identified as malicious and have absolutely no financial impact on your business.
There is almost nothing more frustrating for a SOC team than to chase false positives. In fact, a recent survey found that SOCs spend 32% of the day on incidents that pose no threat. Not only is this not cost-beneficial for an organization, it also leads to burnout.
9. Preparedness Level
This valuable metric describes an organization’s level of cyber readiness to defend against potential incidents. Organizations can take proactive security measures by conducting a cyber maturity assessment and measuring incident response readiness and response time. Doing so can ensure that security policies and procedures are in place and that routine employee training programs are incorporated to maximize your chances against emerging threats.
10. Patching Cadence
Patching cadence refers to the regularity with which software patches, updates, and other security fixes are applied to systems, applications, and devices. Unpatched software is a leading catalyst of a breach.
A study conducted by the Ponemon Institute found that 60% of breach victims said they were breached due to an unpatched known vulnerability. As many companies have improved their security posture in the past two years, malicious actors are increasingly exploiting vulnerabilities to bypass many organizational security mechanisms. It’s knowing which vulnerabilities to prioritize and focus mitigation efforts on that can drive your cybersecurity ROI.
11. Phishing Attack Success
Are malicious email attachments being opened by employees? More often than you might think. According to the 2023 Gone Phishing Tournament, 10.4% of participants clicked on the malicious link contained within the simulation. With the sheer amount of phishing campaigns conducted, this number of clicks is more than enough to gain unauthorized access to many companies. Phishing attacks have become even more sophisticated with the use of AI. Organizations leverage phishing simulations to test the resilience of their security protocols and employee phishing awareness.
How to calculate phishing attack success rate:
Total phishing emails sent / total successful phishing attacks
There’s a lot involved in a phishing simulation, but tracking this critical metric can spare you millions in the event of an actual breach caused by a real phishing attack.
12. Policy Violation Incidents
This metric provides insight into where employee behaviors deviate from established security policies and protocols. Examples of policy violations include unauthorized data transfers, neglecting critical software or OS updates, and disabling security controls like firewalls to access confidential information.
How to calculate violation rate:
Total employees or systems / total policy violations
Another consideration is the severity of these violations. The higher their severity, the greater the impact on the organization’s security posture.
13. First-Party Security Ratings
This KPI measures an organization’s internal assessment of its own cybersecurity posture. Based on these findings, an organization will be able to assign a letter-based grade to communicate the risk posture better to key stakeholders.
The best way to uncover cyber gaps is to perform a thorough cybersecurity risk assessment to identify critical issues, vulnerabilities, and weaknesses that require immediate attention. That way, CISOs can better understand their entire risk landscape and what could pose the greatest threats.
Maximize Your Cybersecurity KPIs and ROI with Hyver
Cybersecurity budgets will forever be limited. Don’t waste valuable resources mitigating risks with no impact on your cybersecurity ROI. Instead, prioritize risk remediation according to business KPIs.
CYE’s Hyver platform determines the potential financial consequences of cyber risk in dollars and the costs associated with mitigation efforts. It helps you focus on mitigating the vulnerabilities that have the highest impact on your business with quantifiable data.
Want to learn how Hyver can help you maximize ROI from your cybersecurity investments? Schedule a demo today.
