In today’s digital landscape, organizations continuously face cybersecurity threats. With ever-evolving cyber risks, it is critical for security and business leaders to understand and effectively communicate the true state of their cybersecurity posture to drive decisions.
By tracking and monitoring the right cybersecurity metrics around detection, investigation, and response (DIR) workflows, organizations can accurately assess their security posture and optimize their security operations. Measuring key performance indicators (KPIs) and analyzing relevant data enables organizations to gain actionable insights into their security landscape and identify areas for improvement.
In this blog, we will delve into the critical security operations metrics that matter. These metrics offer a comprehensive view of an organization’s proficiency in the DIR workflow, enabling them to efficiently identify, analyze, and counter potential cyber threats.
Why Track Metrics
CISO Perspective
CISOs leverage metrics to effectively communicate the state of their cybersecurity program, enabling informed discussions among executive and board conversations around business and cyber risk. By providing comprehensive information, CISOs help organizational leadership understand the trendlines and gauge the maturation and performance of their security program relative to company peers. For example, is the Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR) security incidents trending downward? Is the organization performing better than peer companies?
Leader Perspective
Security leaders typically use metrics to establish and refine security strategy and maturity, particularly around the threat detection, investigation, and response process. The right metrics inform investment decisions or resource allocations to control risk. For instance, evaluating MITRE ATT&CK detection coverage can reveal opportunities where additional visibility or more detection capability might be required.
Analyst Perspective
Security practitioners and analysts need metrics to inform tactical decisions to better manage day-to-day security operations decisions as they investigate and respond to incidents. For example, tracking the use of response playbooks can uncover opportunities to automate response and remediation actions and processes. If analysts frequently encounter a particular phishing alert, they can implement an automated response play leveraging existing tools. This accelerates response and saves analysts from swiveling between consoles.
9 Cybersecurity Metrics to Track
Detection
1. Data Source Visibility: This metric enables organizations to understand the percentage of your environment that you can see compared to all the data sources you might expect to see. Improving data source visibility enables organizations to strengthen their ability to proactively detect and respond to potential security incidents.
To help you gain an understanding of your visibility level, consider the following questions:
- Do you have holistic visibility into your environment?
- Do you have the right level of visibility into threats?
2. Data Source Diversity: Data source diversity ensures comprehensive threat visibility by tracking the distinct data source functions that are available and enabled to improve monitoring fidelity. Leveraging these data sources provides a broader view of attack patterns, reduces false positives, and enables a proactive approach to your cybersecurity.
To determine the diversity of your data sources, reflect on the following questions:
- Are you missing detection coverage?
- How well are your existing tools functioning?
3. MITRE ATT&CK Coverage: By aligning with MITRE ATT&CK, organizations can comprehensively assess their detection capabilities and identify areas for improvement. MITRE ATT&CK covers several attack techniques, enabling organizations to prioritize defense measures based on real-world scenarios and known adversarial behaviors and strengthen their detection capabilities against a variety of cyber threats. This coverage allows you to compare deployed techniques against total possible techniques available based on the technologies that you own.
Consider the following questions when assessing if your organization aligns with MITRE:
- Are we utilizing the MITRE ATT&CK framework to guide our detection capabilities?
- Have we mapped our existing detection mechanisms to the MITRE ATT&CK techniques?
Investigation
4. False-Positive Rate: Measuring your false-positive rate can help you assess alert noise. Eliminating false-positives saves time during investigations and ensures resources are focused on real threats rather than false alarms triggered by benign events. This metric can enhance the effectiveness of security teams by reducing alert noise and improving incident response.
Answering the following questions can help you get a good sense of how your team is performing:
- Is our current false-positive rate within an acceptable range?
- Is there more we can do to reduce false positives?
5. Anomalous Safe Rate (ASR): ASR is a key investigation metric measuring the accuracy of alerts. Anomalous-safe alerts are alerts where the activity has been judged to be safe, but the same activity can sometimes be malicious.
A low ASR score reduces false alarms, allowing security teams to prioritize legitimate threats and allocate resources efficiently. Monitoring ASR helps organizations evaluate system reliability and make necessary improvements.
To help you gain an understanding of your ASR level, consider the following questions:
- Is the current anomalous safe rate at an acceptable level?
- Are we miscategorizing alerts that should be anomalous safe?
6. Threat Hunting Success Rate: Threat hunting metrics can uncover patterns and trends in malicious activities, allowing teams to move from reactive to proactive. They serve as a measure of proactive security, identifying weaknesses or holes in a security program.
Consider the following questions when assessing your threat hunting metrics:
- How do we measure and track the effectiveness of our threat hunting activities during investigations?
- What is the story underlying a successful threat hunt that can inform changes in our protective security layers or security policies?
Response
7. Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR): These metrics evaluate the time it takes an organization to resolve an incident. It is worth noting that some people measure “respond” rather than “resolve” and you should be clear on your definition. “Resolve” typically means “incident closed,” where “respond” may mean “my security provider responded by notifying me of an incident.” By tracking MTTR, you can reduce the amount of time an attacker can dwell in your environment. Comparing MTTR scores across time periods helps assess the effectiveness of response strategies and demonstrate incident response capabilities.
To gain insight on how your MTTR affects your response efforts, consider the following:
- Where is your team spending its time during the threat detection, investigation, and response process?
- Are there any process improvements we can make to drive down MTTR?
8. Close Rate: Close rate metrics measure the percentage of incidents successfully closed within a given timeframe, allowing organizations to evaluate the performance of their response teams and where they’re spending their time. By analyzing incidents with lower close rates, organizations can understand the underlying causes of delays or challenges, leading to the identification of process inefficiencies, resource gaps, and training needs.
To determine the effectiveness of your close rate during response, consider the following questions:
- Is the current close rate at an acceptable level?
- How can we improve our close rate?
9. Playbook Execution: Response playbooks can reduce threat dwell time and speed MTTR. To assess the effectiveness of executing predefined response playbooks during incident response, organizations need to consider playbook execution metrics. This metric helps uncover opportunities to automate response and remediation actions and processes. By tracking playbook execution, organizations can improve response processes, identify areas for further automation, and effectively communicate their incident response capabilities to stakeholders.
Answer the following questions to evaluate the effectiveness of your playbook execution:
- What was the total execution time of the playbook?
- Are there frequent alerts where we can deploy automated response playbooks?
How these Metrics Improve Your Overall Security Operations
Tracking the right cybersecurity key performance indicators (KPIs) offers benefits to various audiences, from the board to cybersecurity leadership to the analyst team. These metrics provide a clear overview of an organization’s security posture, measure the effectiveness of cybersecurity initiatives, and facilitate tactical process improvements, ultimately enabling strategic and tactical decision-making. Leveraging the right cybersecurity KPIs promotes continuous improvement by tracking progress, identifying areas for enhancement, and managing risk.
Benefits of a Cybersecurity Dashboard
Cybersecurity dashboards offer an intuitive and consolidated view of the organization’s security posture, providing clarity and communicating the effectiveness of their security operations. They empower you to communicate risk by highlighting emerging threats, enabling the team to stay ahead of potential security incidents. Dashboards present risk data concisely, making it accessible and relevant to board members, bridging the gap between technical details and strategic decision-making.
Gain Clarity with the GreyMatter Security Model Index
As a dashboard, the GreyMatter Security Model Index helps improve reporting and gives security leaders real-time views into critical areas of security operations. Model Index metrics are benchmarked against previous quarters and industry peers, giving measurable insights into how your program is performing comparatively and maturing over time. It ensures effective communication of the value your security operations bring to the organization and helps you to improve your security maturity over time.