Vulnerability Management Metrics: Measuring Effectiveness and Performance

Vulnerability management requires a mix of metrics to measure performance and demonstrate success to stakeholders effectively. Efficiency, coverage, capacity, and risk reduction are the primary measures to consider when evaluating vulnerability remediation efforts.

Mean time to remediate (MTTR) is an essential metric for businesses, as the lower the MTTR, the less exposure to exploits.

False Positive Rate

The ability to distinguish legitimate vulnerabilities from false positives enables organizations to reduce the number of unneeded fixes and limit risk exposure. It also helps them refine their detection methods and prevents wasting resources on non-threats.

The average time it takes to resolve a vulnerability once a problem is identified. This is a critical measure of IT team responsiveness and capacity.

CISOs need metrics showing how well their program works, including efficiency, coverage, and velocity. They also need to understand how these metrics fit within the organization’s risk tolerance and how they relate to security priorities and threat models. The right metrics will provide clarity for teams and help elevate vulnerability management to business leaders and decision-makers. However, gathering these metrics is a process that requires careful planning by IT and security teams to ensure success. The key is to start with the right metric and work up from there.

Time-to-Remediate

The ability to patch vulnerabilities promptly can reduce the impact of cyber attacks. Measuring the average time to close a vulnerability provides insight into your team’s ability to respond quickly to identified risks and prioritize remediation tasks.

Keeping the number of open vulnerabilities low requires attention to process and culture. Teams that race to close every vulnerability as fast as possible are often less effective than those that take the time to resolve only the most critical risks.

This metric focuses on the average time it takes for an organization to find a solution for a specific vulnerability, including the downtime required to implement that resolution. Some CISOs have even changed the name of this metric to “mean time to reboot” since changes may not be fully deployed (and the vulnerability addressed) until after a system restart. This metric excludes false positives, accepted risks, and open vulnerabilities from the total risk remediated.

Patch Deployment Rate

Vulnerability patching is one of the most critical aspects of a strong cybersecurity posture. As such, the success of your organization’s patch management program is a crucial indicator of overall risk reduction.

Software vendors regularly release patches to fix vulnerabilities in their applications. It is essential that IT teams quickly detect and deploy these updates to their systems before hackers can exploit them. The patch deployment rate metric provides a good picture of how well your team manages the process.

If your total remediated vulnerability count is continually trending upward, this is an excellent indication that your team has implemented efficient processes for deploying and testing these fixes. However, if you notice an increase in open vulnerabilities over time, this could indicate that your team should be deploying updates more quickly. Tracking this metric helps you identify any slowdowns in your process and ensure all open vulnerabilities are remedied before hackers can exploit them.

Remediation Compliance

Organizations should focus on vulnerability management metrics that empower stakeholders with the information they need to make sound decisions about reducing risk exposure. They should avoid focusing on a handful of VM metrics that may only provide value from a technical perspective (e.g., number of scans, attacks, patches applied, etc.).

A key metric to monitor is the residual risk metric, which determines how much of an attack surface remains after vulnerabilities have been remediated. This metric helps ensure patches are efficiently deployed and remediated across the organization’s infrastructure.

If a high-risk vulnerability is not fixed, it can expose the organization to severe risks and penalties. This metric is best monitored using scanners with auto-discovery functionality so that all machines on the network can be scanned regularly. This metric also provides visibility into whether the organization has missed specific systems and how long it takes to detect and resolve vulnerabilities.