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Top Cybersecurity KPIs and Metrics to Track in 2024

Safeguarding sensitive data, preventing data breaches, and identifying cyber-attacks demand a systematic approach. This can be achieved using a well-structured checklist to track your efforts. Utilizing cybersecurity key risk indicators has proven to be an effective strategy in measuring the success of various programs, including cybersecurity, while also assisting in informed decision-making. To make it easier for you, we have compiled 14 practical information security metrics and measurements to enable you to take charge of your risk identification and remediation processes. Continue reading until the end to find out everything!

Before diving into the information security KPIs, let's understand why information security metrics are essential for your business.

The Significance of Cybersecurity Metrics

Cybersecurity metrics hold significant importance for organizations as they serve as a valuable tool to assess and analyze the effectiveness of their security measures. By providing insights into the security posture, these metrics help identify areas that require improvement, ensuring comprehensive protection against evolving cyber threats. In the present landscape, where cyber threats are continuously increasing in number and sophistication, having reliable and actionable indicators of security health is paramount.

Selecting the appropriate cybersecurity metrics is crucial as they offer essential information for upper management to make informed decisions regarding budget allocation, policy updates, and investments in cyber defense strategies. Accurate metrics offer a clear understanding of the organization's cybersecurity status, enabling executives to make well-grounded decisions that safeguard the business from potential attacks and data breaches.

14 Essential Cyber Security Metrics and KPIs for Effective Monitoring

Here are some of the cybersecurity metrics and KPIs for tracking in 2024:

Preparedness Level

Assess your organization's cybersecurity readiness by tracking:

• The percentage of fully patched and up-to-date devices on your network.
• Regular updates of devices and software.
• A number of identified high-risk vulnerabilities.

Unidentified Internal Network Devices

Mitigate risks by monitoring:

• The number of unidentified devices connected to the network.
• Maintenance of a detailed log of network-associated devices.

Intrusion Attempts

Stay vigilant against cyber threats by measuring:

• Frequency of unauthorized attempts to breach network security.
• The number of recorded malicious intrusion attempts.

Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF)

Measure system reliability by calculating:

• Time elapsed between consecutive failures.
• Incidence of product or system failures.

Mean Time to Detect (MTTD)

Track your team's responsiveness to potential security incidents:

• Duration of undetected security threats within the organization.
• The average time taken to detect security incidents.

Mean Time to Acknowledge (MTTA)

Ensure timely acknowledgment of incidents by evaluating:

• Average time to address alerts after receiving them.
• Consistency in documenting and adhering to acknowledgment processes.

Mean Time to Contain (MTTC)

Assess the effectiveness of containment procedures by determining:

• Time taken to contain identified attack vectors.
• Existence and consistency of well-documented containment processes.

Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR)

Measure the speed of threat response and resolution by tracking:

• Time taken to respond to threats after awareness.
• Processes for restoring networks, systems, and data post-cyber incidents.

Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR)

Evaluate the recovery process efficiency by analyzing:

• Time is taken to restore operations after a cyber breach or disruption.
• Historical data on recovery time from previous incidents.

Days to Patch

Enhance post-cyber breach efficiency by measuring:

• Time taken to implement security patches after release.
• Definition and measurement of "days to patch" within the organization.

Cybersecurity Awareness Training

Enhance employees' understanding of cyber threats by focusing on:

• Documentation and maintenance of cybersecurity awareness training programs.
• Inclusion of all organizational members, including senior executives.

Cybersecurity Awareness Training Results

Assess the effectiveness of training programs through:

• Evaluation of participants' comprehension and completion rates.
• Offering recurring cybersecurity training and conducting tests for employees.

Number of Cybersecurity Incidents Reported

Encourage a culture of reporting issues by tracking:

• User-reported cybersecurity incidents compared to industry benchmarks or previous years.

Security Ratings

Simplify communication with non-technical stakeholders using a standardized security rating system:

• Monitoring the security rating of the organization.
• Comparing the security rating against competitors in the industry.

Understanding Application Security Metrics with Mobiz

Our cloud security solutions enable businesses to protect their data in the cloud with confidence. We provide a comprehensive suite of cloud services, which includes robust data encryption, strict access controls, and various other measures, ensuring a continuous and robust security posture for safeguarding your valuable data.

Our dedicated team of cloud security specialists utilizes a variety of data sources to ensure configurations, flow logs, audit logs, and host, and container logs to deliver in-depth security and compliance insights that encompass your entire cloud-native technology stack. Moreover, our service guarantees that your cloud applications remain compliant with the latest security standards and regulations.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the 14 essential cybersecurity metrics and KPIs for effective monitoring?

The 14 essential cybersecurity metrics and KPIs are as follows:

• Preparedness Level: Gauge readiness with metrics like patch management, software updates, and high-risk vulnerabilities.
• Unidentified Internal Network Devices: Focus on identifying and logging unknown network devices.
• Intrusion Attempts: Stay vigilant by tracking unauthorized intrusion attempts.
• Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF): Assess system reliability by measuring the time between failures.
• Mean Time to Detect (MTTD): Evaluate incident detection speed.
• Mean Time to Acknowledge (MTTA): Ensure timely incident acknowledgment.
• Mean Time to Contain (MTTC): Measure effectiveness in containing attacks.
• Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR): Track threat response and resolution speed.
• Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR): Analyze recovery efficiency post-breach.
• Days to Patch: Enhance post-breach patching speed.
• Cybersecurity Awareness Training: Document and maintain training programs.
• Cybersecurity Awareness Training Results: Evaluate training effectiveness.
• Number of Cybersecurity Incidents Reported: Encourage reporting culture.
• Security Ratings: Use standardized ratings for communication and comparison.

by Mobiz

How to Perform an Information Security Gap Analysis

The ever-changing cyber threat landscape demands organizations to reevaluate their security controls continuously, as yesterday's measures may no longer be sufficient. Cyberattacks occur frequently, and a breach can lead to the exposure of clients' sensitive data, resulting in financial penalties and reputational damage. In such situations, conducting an information security gap analysis becomes crucial. It allows organizations to identify weaknesses in their network security controls, ensuring a robust and effective network. By comparing existing methods with industry best practices, the information security gap analysis reveals areas that require improvement and provides insights into implementing the right structure and controls.

What is Gap Analysis in Cyber Security

An information security gap analysis, also referred to as IT security gap analysis, is a thorough evaluation that assists organizations in determining the disparity between their existing information security measures and the specific requirements of their industry. Conducting a security gap analysis enables an understanding of the cybersecurity risks and vulnerabilities present within the organization, empowering them to address and resolve these gaps in their security effectively.

Performing a gap analysis for cyber security can yield significant benefits, but its success depends on proper execution. Let's explore the steps involved in conducting an effective cybersecurity gap analysis.

Gap Analysis in Information Security

Here are the steps for performing a security gap analysis:

Step 1: Select an Industry-Standard Security Framework

Choosing a recognized security framework is crucial as it provides the foundational best practices against which you can assess your own security program. For instance, the widely-used ISO/EIC - 27002 standard covers critical security areas such as risk assessment, access control, change management, and physical security.

While a capable security team can conduct the gap analysis, seeking an independent third party to evaluate your security plan is advisable. External consultants often spot gaps that may be overlooked by those immersed in the network's daily operations. In certain cases, industry compliance standards like HIPAA and PCI may even mandate involving an outside consultant to ensure adherence to state and federal regulations.

Step 2: Evaluate People and Processes

Once the framework and assessment approach are selected, gather relevant information about your systems and conduct interviews to gain a better understanding of the organization's key objectives.

Thorough interviews with key stakeholders, as well as pertinent departments such as HR and legal, are essential. This process includes engaging the leadership team, IT staff, security administrators (if applicable), and personnel responsible for network, server, or workstation management.

Objective: Obtain Comprehensive IT Environment Insights

The main aim is to gather extensive information about your IT environment, application inventory, organizational charts, policies, processes, and other relevant details.

This enables the discovery of existing security policies, an understanding of your organization's future direction over the next three to five years, and the identification of associated security risks.

Addressing Human Behavior to Reduce Risks

Many risks faced by company networks are attributable to human actions, such as inadvertently clicking on phishing emails, inadequate leadership training, or deliberate acts of sabotage by disgruntled employees. Addressing human behavior is crucial to mitigating threats to data.

Key Staff Contributions to Implementing Controls

Key staff members play a vital role in providing insights into the implementation of various controls, such as access management for new hires and terminations, adherence to role-based access policies, change procedures, approvals, back-out plans for potential issues, and staff training to stay updated on evolving security risks.

Step 3: Data Gathering - Evaluating Security Program Effectiveness

Data gathering aims to assess the efficiency of your current security program within the technical architecture. During this step, it is essential to compare best-practice standards like ISO 27002 or NIST 800-53 and relevant requirements against your organizational controls. Conducting samples of network devices, servers, and applications validates gaps and weaknesses. Additionally, reviewing automated security controls, incident response processes, communications protocols, and log files provides crucial insights.

This comprehensive data collection paints a clear picture of your technical environment, existing protections, and overall security effectiveness.

Step 4: Analysis - Assessing Security Program Effectiveness

The final step involves conducting an in-depth analysis of your security program. If you opt to engage a third-party partner for the gap analysis, they should benchmark your organization's security program against industry best practices throughout the data-gathering process. Leveraging our years of experience in security evaluations, we correlate findings from the gap analysis across all aspects to create a concise picture of your IT security profile. This assessment highlights strengths and areas needing improvement, assigning a score (graded zero to four) that offers a non-technical evaluation of your organization's security program.

With this valuable information, we can help you design a tailored security roadmap that considers risks, staffing, budget requirements, and timelines for implementing the recommended security enhancements.

Performing Gap Analysis with Mobiz

By utilizing cybersecurity services by Mobiz, your organization's IT security team can conduct a thorough evaluation of its security program. Mobiz facilitates this process by providing automated cloud-based questionnaires through a secure and centralized platform, effectively reducing the questionnaire cycle by 50%. Through this efficient approach, you can readily identify security gaps for your organization and third-party vendors, streamlining vulnerability identification and remediation.

Final Thoughts

Conducting an information security gap analysis is vital for organizations to assess their network security controls effectively. By comparing existing practices with industry standards, weaknesses can be identified, enabling the implementation of necessary improvements. Addressing human behavior and data gathering are essential elements, leading to a comprehensive understanding of the security program's effectiveness. Leveraging the analysis results, organizations can create a tailored security roadmap to mitigate risks and enhance protection. In a rapidly evolving cyber threat landscape, continuous security evaluation is crucial for safeguarding sensitive data, maintaining trust, and ensuring resilience against potential attacks.

by Mobiz

How to Prevent DDoS Attacks? 10 Best Practices

DDoS attacks allow malicious intruders to flood a network or server with fabricated traffic, causing an overwhelming strain on resources and disrupting connectivity. As a result, the system cannot handle legitimate user requests, leading to service unavailability, extended downtime, financial losses, and customer dissatisfaction. To help you protect from DDoS attacks, this blog includes effective strategies for businesses to proactively defend against DDoS attacks and maintain a competitive edge over potential hackers. The following practices outlined below aim to mitigate the impact of such attacks and facilitate DDoS prevention techniques in the face of an attempted breach.

DDoS Attack 101

A Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack is a cybercrime where an assailant overwhelms a server by flooding it with a substantial volume of internet traffic. This malicious activity hinders legitimate users from accessing online services and websites.

DDoS attacks are driven by diverse motivations, drawing the attention of various individuals and organizations. Some attackers may engage in such actions due to personal grievances, hacktivism, or the desire to exploit cybersecurity weaknesses for amusement or to express disapproval.

The most common types of DDoS attacks are as follows:

• Volumetric DDoS attacks: Volumetric DDoS attacks involve overwhelming a target with a large volume of traffic, typically by flooding an online application with simultaneous requests from multiple sources. Botnets, compromised networks of computers, are often used to carry out these attacks. Attackers exploit botnets to coordinate continuous requests, depleting the target's resources and causing disruption. Recently, attackers have extended their objectives beyond disruption, using DDoS attacks for extortion and as a distraction to carry out activities like data theft and malware installation.
• Application-layer DDoS attacks: Application-layer attacks pose significant risks to organizations, as they can result in data theft, network downtime, business disruption, and financial extortion. These attacks, including DDoS attacks, SYN flood attacks, SQL injections, and cross-site scripting, are constantly evolving and growing in complexity. To effectively defend against these threats, organizations require adaptive cybersecurity solutions that can dynamically counter emerging attack techniques while minimizing administrative overhead.
• Protocol DDoS attacks: Protocol attacks, also known as state-exhaustion attacks, disrupt services by excessively consuming server resources and network equipment resources such as firewalls and load balancers.

How to Stop DDoS Attacks?

We have shortlisted some of our tried and tested tips and techniques for preventing DDoS attacks:

Increase Bandwidth Capacity

Consider scaling up your network's bandwidth to alleviate the impact of DDoS attacks. By expanding your capacity, your organization can better handle larger volumes of traffic. However, you may need additional solutions against increasingly sophisticated volumetric DDoS attacks.

Understand Your Network's Traffic Patterns

Gain insight into the typical Internet traffic patterns within your organization's infrastructure. This knowledge will establish a baseline, identifying unusual activity that may indicate a DDoS attack.

Enhance Network Resilience

Implement measures to strengthen your network's resilience against DDoS attacks. Beyond relying solely on firewalls, diversify your data centers across different networks, distribute them in separate physical locations, utilize multiple data centers, and optimize network configurations to prevent traffic bottlenecks.

Improve Your Network Security

Educate and encourage users to adopt best security practices, such as regularly changing passwords, employing secure authentication methods, and being vigilant against phishing attacks. By minimizing user errors, your organization can improve overall security even in an attack.

Utilize Anti-DDoS Hardware and Software

Leverage dedicated hardware and software solutions to defend against and mitigate DDoS attacks. These products provide specialized protection against various types of attacks. Additionally, harden your IT infrastructure by adjusting settings, removing unused ports, and enabling timeouts for partially open connections.

Develop a DDoS Response Plan

Create a comprehensive plan in advance to effectively respond to a potential DDoS attack. Consider the complexity of your infrastructure and include elements such as a systems checklist, a trained response team, clear notification and escalation procedures, a list of internal and external contacts to inform about the attack, and a communication plan for stakeholders like customers or vendors.

Embrace Cloud Services

While it cannot eliminate DDoS attacks, migrating to the cloud can help mitigate their impact. Cloud resources typically offer increased bandwidth compared to on-premise infrastructure, and the distributed nature of the cloud ensures servers are geographically dispersed.

Recognize the Symptoms of an Attack

Familiarize yourself with the signs that may indicate a DDoS attack, such as sudden network slowdowns, website shutdowns, a surge in spam, decreased performance, high demand on a specific page or endpoint, outages or crashes, poor connectivity, or any abnormal traffic originating from a single IP address.

Continuously Monitor for Unusual Activity

Maintain ongoing network monitoring to detect any signs of abnormal traffic or suspicious activity. Real-time monitoring allows for swift detection of a DDoS attack, enabling prompt action to mitigate its impact.

Consider Outsourcing DDoS Protection

Explore options for outsourcing DDoS protection through specialized service providers. These companies can offer expertise in rapidly scaling resources to respond to attacks, fortifying defenses, and mitigating the impact of ongoing attacks.

How Mobiz Offers Robust Solutions to DDoS Attacks

Cyber attackers consistently seek out the most vulnerable aspects of an organization, system, or network. Hence, DDoS attack prevention is crucial for businesses of all sizes. To effectively monitor your internet traffic, it is best to utilize cybersecurity services that provide continuous network monitoring, offering an external perspective on your company's security. At Mobiz, our team of highly skilled experts helps organizations establish all levels of corporate network security and train employees on how to handle DDoS attacks.

Look no further and sign up for our services today to safeguard your business against DDoS threats!

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a DDoS prevention system?

A DDoS prevention system is a dedicated security solution crafted to detect, mitigate, and prevent attacks targeting networks, servers, or applications. This system employs various advanced techniques and mechanisms to accurately identify and filter out malicious traffic, ensuring the uninterrupted availability and integrity of online services.

Why is DDoS prevention important?

DDoS prevention is crucial for maintaining the continuous availability of services, protecting an organization's reputation, and minimizing financial losses associated with downtime. It also serves to safeguard sensitive data and intellectual property, ensure compliance with regulations, and provide a competitive edge by showcasing reliability and security to customers. In essence, DDoS prevention is an essential element of comprehensive cybersecurity strategies.

by Mobiz