What Metrics Matter in Preemptive Cyber Defense (PCD)?

Preemptive cyber defense (PCD) uses predictive threat intelligence and advanced data analytics to anticipate cyberattacks before they emerge. By doing so, it enables the organization to take action to neutralize these threats before the attacker carries out their objective and poses a real risk to the business.

Metrics are invaluable for determining the effectiveness of PCD at accurately forecasting future threats to the business. Selecting the right metrics enables an organization to effectively design and tune its PCD program to manage evolving cyber threats.

Must-Track KPIs

Defining the right metrics is key to understanding the effectiveness of a PCD program and its benefits to the business. While an organization may select custom metrics based on various business needs and priorities, the following four are key KPIs for assessing various elements of a PCD program.

Exposure Discovery Rate

The exposure discovery rate quantifies the number of exposures that an organization has identified within its environment. This includes misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, third-party risk, and other elements of the organization’s digital attack surface.

An organization’s exposure discovery rate provides insight into how effective the organization is at identifying real threats to the organization’s systems. A high rate indicates that the PCD system is staying up-to-date with emerging exposures, which is essential since cyberattackers commonly target recently disclosed vulnerabilities.

Validation Accuracy

Validation accuracy specifies the percentage of exposures that pose a real risk to the business. In some cases, a vulnerability uncovered by a vulnerability scanner or similar tool may not actually be exploitable, meaning that it poses no real threat to the business.

PCD programs should incorporate attack simulation capabilities to ensure that an attacker could actually exploit a vulnerability and that it leads to real harm to the business and its IT assets. The rate of false positives remaining in reported exposures indicates the effectiveness of this program and whether the security team is wasting time and resources investigating and eliminating false positive detections.

Remediation Velocity

Remediation velocity captures how quickly a validated exposure is addressed after being reported. Common metrics include mean time to remediate (MTTR) or the percentage of exposures that are addressed within a particular time period, often specified within a service level agreement (SLA).

Remediation velocity is an important metric because PCD is designed to identify and close exposures before they can be exploited within a cyberattack. A high velocity indicates that the organization is effectively doing so and making good use of strategic automation. Increases in the remediation velocity demonstrate continuous improvement as processes and tools enable faster prioritization and mitigation.

Residual Risk Trend

Often, companies have more vulnerabilities in their systems than they have the resources to address, which is what makes exposure validation and prioritization so important. The residual risk trend measures the change in unresolved risks to the business over time.

Monitoring the residual risk trend is important because it provides insight into whether exposure management efforts are actually having a real impact, reducing the organization’s risk exposure. If residual risk is static or growing, it indicates that security efforts aren’t keeping up with the introduction of new exposures into the environment, and that changes are needed to enhance their effectiveness.

Building a PCD-Ready Dashboard

A PCD-ready dashboard should enable an organization to quickly assess the effectiveness of a PCD program and identify potential areas of improvement. Some best practices include:

• Visualize Key Metrics: Metrics such as exposure discovery rate, validation accuracy, remediation velocity, and residual risk should be visualized on the dashboard. This makes it easy for users to track trends that could indicate an effective program or one in need of improvement.
• Real-Time Updates: An organization’s set of open exposures can change rapidly as new vulnerabilities are introduced and others are closed. Real-time visibility is important to ensure that the organization is able to address emerging and evolving risks.
• Security Integration: A PCD dashboard needs visibility into various elements of an organization’s security architecture to provide useful data. The dashboard should be integrated with asset inventories, threat intelligence feeds, incident response platforms, and other tools to ensure comprehensive, up-to-date visibility.
• Customizable Focus: Different organizations have various priorities and different critical assets and workflows. Users should be able to customize the view to offer visibility into the information that matters most to them.

Creating a dashboard that shows the right metrics and trends is essential to demonstrate the value of a PCD program. If stakeholders can easily access the data they need, this information is more likely to be integrated into key strategic decision-making.

Continuous Improvement Loop

PCD platforms are designed to protect an organization’s ever-changing environment against a rapidly evolving cyber threat landscape. To do so effectively, an organization’s PCD program needs to continuously improve to scale and enhance the organization’s security.

PCD programs should be built around a continuous feedback loop that enables the security team to tune the organization’s program and tools to better manage its security risk exposure. Key elements of this feedback loop include:

• Metric Collection: The organization should select metrics that define and quantify its goals for its exposure management program. For example, validation accuracy may be critical if the security team is commonly overwhelmed with false positive detections that impair the effectiveness of its exposure management program.
• Metric Analysis: With the right metrics in place, the organization can monitor them over time to track the velocity of the exposure management program. Any deviations from expectations or goals, such as a stagnant or growing residual risk value, should trigger root cause analysis and adjustments.
• Adjust Responses: Based on analysis of current metrics and trends, the organization may update detection logic, validation processes, remediation automations, and other features to improve the effectiveness of the exposure management program.
• Monitoring and Retrospectives: After making changes, the security team can monitor the effects of the adjustment on key metrics. This enables the organization to replace things that aren’t working or build on successes.

Maximizing the ROI of Preemptive Cyber Defense

PCD is designed to reduce an organization’s risk exposure by identifying and addressing the exposures that attackers may target in future attacks. Quantifying the impact of a PCD program requires the collection and analysis of various metrics since it’s difficult to assign monetary value to the fact that PCD might have prevented an attack that could have cost the organization a certain amount of money.

While an organization can tune metrics to its business needs, exposure discovery rate, validation accuracy, remediation velocity, and residual risk trend are key KPIs since they offer insight into various key elements of a PCD program. With them, the business can identify how effective it is at finding threats, what percentage of these exposures pose real risks, how well the organization closes these security gaps, and whether the security team is keeping up with the introduction of new exposures into its environment.

The IONIX platform simplifies the process of implementing PCD and tracking its effectiveness through key metrics. IONIX performs continuous exposure detection and automatically validates identified exposures through simulated attacks. It also streamlines remediation through automated actions designed to make sure that any gaps in security are closed before they can be exploited. 

To learn more about how the IONIX platform can help your organization reduce its real-world attack surface, register for a free demo.