How is your vulnerability management program going? Is it effective? A success? Let’s be honest, without the right metrics or analytics, how can you know how well you are doing, progressing, or getting ROI? If you’re not measuring, how do you know it’s working?
And even if you’re measuring, poor reporting or focusing on the wrong metrics can create blind spots and make it harder to communicate any risks to the rest of the business.
So how do you know what to focus on? Cyber hygiene, scan coverage, mean time to resolution, vulnerability severity, remediation rates, vulnerability exposure… the list is endless. Each tool on the market offers different parameters, so it can be difficult to know what is important.
This article will help you identify and define the key metrics you need to monitor the status of your vulnerability management program and its progress, so you can create audit-ready reports that:
- Demonstrate your level of confidence
- Meet SLAs and benchmarks for remediating vulnerabilities
- Helps pass audits and compliance
- Demonstrate ROI on security tools
- Simplify risk analysis
- Prioritize resource allocation
Why you need to measure vulnerability management
Metrics play a critical role in assessing vulnerability effectiveness and managing the attack surface. Measuring how quickly you find, prioritize and resolve defects means you can continuously monitor and optimize your security.
With the right analytics, you can see which problems are most critical, prioritize what to fix first, and measure the progress of your efforts. Ultimately, the right metrics allow you to make well-informed decisions, so you allocate resources in the right places.
The number of vulnerabilities found is always a good starting point, but on its own it doesn’t say much: without priorities, warnings and progress, where to start? Finding, prioritizing and remediating the most critical vulnerabilities is far more important to business operations and data security than simply finding every vulnerability.
Intelligent prioritization and noise filtering are important because overlooking real security threats is all too easy when you’re overwhelmed with non-essential information. Intelligent results simplify your work by prioritizing issues that have a real impact on your security, without burdening you with irrelevant pain points.
For example, your Internet-connected systems are the easiest targets for hackers. Prioritizing the problems that leave it exposed makes it easier to minimize your attack surface. Tools like Intruder make vulnerability management easier even for non-experts by explaining real risks and providing remediation recommendations in easy-to-understand language. But beyond prioritization, what else should or could you measure?
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| An example of the intruder vulnerability management report page |
5 key metrics for every vulnerability management program
Scan coverage
What are you tracking and scanning? Scan coverage includes all covered resources and analysis of all business-critical resources and applications, as well as the type of authentication offered (for example, username and password-based or unauthenticated).
As your attack surface evolves, changes, and grows over time, it’s important to monitor any changes to what’s covered and your IT environment, such as recently opened ports and services. A modern scanner will detect implementations you may not be aware of and prevent your sensitive data from being inadvertently exposed. It should also monitor your cloud systems for changes, discover new resources, and automatically sync your IPs or hostnames with cloud integrations.
Average time for correction
The time it takes your team to fix your critical vulnerabilities reveals how responsive your team is when reacting to the findings of any reported vulnerabilities. This should be consistently low as the security team is responsible for resolving issues and delivering the message and action plans for resolution to management. It should also be based on the default SLA. The severity of the vulnerability should correspond to a relative or absolute time frame for planning and remediation.
Risk score
The severity of each issue is automatically calculated by the scanner, usually Critical, High, or Medium. If you decide not to patch a specific vulnerability or group within a specified time period, this is an acceptance of risk. With Intruder you can postpone a problem if you are willing to accept the risk and there are mitigating factors.
For example, when you are preparing for a SOC2 or ISO audit and notice a critical risk, you may be willing to accept it because the resource required to resolve it is not justified by the actual level of risk or potential impact on the business. Of course, when it comes to reporting, your CTO may want to know how many issues are being deferred and why!
Problems
This is the point from making a vulnerability public to having scanned all targets and detected any issues. Essentially, how quickly vulnerabilities are detected on the attack surface, so that they can be patched and the window of opportunity for an attacker can be reduced.
What does this mean in practice? If your attack surface increases, you may find that it takes longer to perform a full scan, and your average detection time may also increase. Conversely, if your average detection time remains stable or decreases, you are using your resources effectively. If you start to see the opposite, you should ask yourself why does it take longer to detect things? And if the answer is that the attack surface has ballooned, perhaps you need to invest more in your security tools and team.
Measure progress
Prioritization, or smart outcomes, is important to help you decide what to fix first, due to its potential impact on your business. Intruder filters out noise and helps reduce false positives, which is a key metric to track because once you reduce the amount of noise you can go back and focus on the most important metric: average time to fix.
Why is this important? Because when you find a problem, you want to be able to solve it as quickly as possible. Tools like Intruder use multiple scan engines to interpret output and prioritize results based on context, so you can save time and focus on what really matters.
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| When a new vulnerability is identified that could critically affect your systems, Intruder will automatically launch a scan |
Attack surface monitoring
This helps you see the percentage of protected resources on your attack surface, discovered or undiscovered. As your team launches new apps, the vulnerability scanner should check when a new service is exposed, so you can prevent data from being inadvertently exposed. Modern scanners monitor your cloud systems to detect changes, find new resources, and sync your IPs or hostnames with your integrations.
Why is this important? Your attack surface will inevitably evolve over time, from opening ports to creating new cloud instances, you need to monitor these changes to minimize your exposure. This is where attack surface discovery comes into play. The number of new services discovered during the specified time period helps you understand whether your attack surface is growing (intentionally or unintentionally).
Why these parameters are important
Modern attack surface management tools like Intruder measure what matters most. They help provide stakeholder reporting and compliance with priority vulnerabilities and integrations with issue tracking tools. You can see what’s vulnerable and get the exact priorities, remediations, insights and automation you need to manage your cyber risk. If you want to see Intruder in action you can request a demo or try it for free for 14 days.