How to Measure Success of a Cybersecurity Exercise
Successfully conducting a cybersecurity exercise brings lots of benefits to organizations. It helps your team improve their cyber skills and enhance the organization’s security posture.
However, these types of exercises usually require a lot of investment of time and resources from the organization’s side to make sure that everything goes smoothly and according to the plan.
In order to ensure the effectiveness of the cybersecurity exercise, it is important to measure results and track down different metrics to understand the insights and analyze the performance of your team.
So, what are the most important metrics to measure the success of a cybersecurity exercise? Follow along as we give you the full overview of this article.
Why Is It Important to Measure Success of a Cybersecurity Exercise?
Regularly conducting different types of cybersecurity exercises and giving your team the ability to practice in real-world scenarios is an important step towards improving your organization’s cyber preparedness.
However, investing your time and resources into these exercises is only valuable when they bring you the actual results.
This means that, as a result of cyber exercises, your organization must have improved security posture, and team members should have an idea of how to handle ever-evolving cyber threats and attacks.
At the same time, insights gained from cyber exercises will help you identify areas of improvement for your team, ensuring that the investment into organizing these exercises is worth it for everyone involved.
How efficient is the incident resolution process? How much time does it take to respond to a cyber attack? What techniques does the team use to identify vulnerabilities? – These are the crucial questions that measuring the success of a cybersecurity exercise helps you answer.
6 Metrics to Implement for Measuring Success of a Cybersecurity Exercise
In order to be effective in measuring the success of your cybersecurity training efforts, you must first identify the action points of your exercise flow and ask the right questions about the outcomes. This approach will help you understand the progress of each step.
Let’s take a look at the list of metrics that you can use to measure the overall success of your cybersecurity exercise.
How Much Time Does It Take to Identify Cyber Threats?
The first step to improving your cyber resilience lies in getting a clear understanding of how much time it takes for your team to identify a cyber threat.
Adequate threat detection is essential if you want to mitigate risks properly. It’s all about the level of awareness in this stage – what is the average time between the start of an attack and the team getting aware of this attempt?
There are different metrics you can measure in this stage – how many alerts were generated? How many of them were false positives, and how many were false negatives? How much time did it take to investigate the alerts?
Answering these questions will help you analyze the effectiveness of your team and improve the overall threat-monitoring processes. This way, the team will have a better idea of how to stay alert and swiftly respond to emerging threats.
How Much Time Does It Take to Respond to a Cyber Attack?
After getting insights into your team’s ability to identify cyber threats, it is important to understand the mean time it takes to respond to these threats and launch a defensive action against them.
Firstly, it is important to think about the duration of isolating the cyber incident and make sure that its impact is minimal once your team has identified it. This is called containment time, and the shorter it is, the more effective your team’s efforts are at mitigating risks.
At the same time, you should measure the recovery time as well, which basically indicates the mean duration the team needs to restore the affected systems. This contributes to creating more effective recovery plans and restoration procedures.
Analyzing these results and determining the exact numbers will help you understand the effectiveness of your team’s incident response capabilities and improve processes to minimize the impact of potential cyber-attacks.
How Much Time Does It Take to Resolve a Cyber Issue?
Another important metric that we should consider is about resolving an issue. In this case, you need to measure the mean time it takes for your team to settle the problem and set processes in place so it won’t happen again.
The most important factors here are effective communication, collaboration, and coordination between your team members on both individual and team levels.
Your team’s ability to effectively recover from a cyber attack directly correlates to business continuity and cyber resilience. The average time it takes for you to identify, respond, and resolve the cyber issue can clearly show the state of your organization’s cyber preparedness.
How Effective Are Your Security Policies and Compliance Efforts?
After getting a clear idea of your team’s incident detection and response capabilities, it is important to evaluate your current security policies and see if they make sense for your organization.
For that, you must conduct regular audits and revisit your policies throughout the exercise to evaluate if your team members have enough skills, tools, and resources available to comply with them in a timely manner.
By having accurate measurements in place, you can identify the key areas of improvement and allocate resources to ensure having more advanced and effective security policies in the future.
What Is the Average Cost per Incident?
Another great metric to track and fully measure success of a cybersecurity exercise on the organizational scale is Cost per Incident.
This is the metric that evaluates the potential financial damage that a successful cyber attack can bring to an organization. Having this information is critical to properly justifying the investment you put in cybersecurity training and preparedness management.
The actual costs associated with cyber attacks are not only the cost of time, tools, mitigation and recovery procedures, fines, and fees but also the potential loss of productivity and reputation on the market – measuring this metric helps you take all of these factors into account.
What Is the Success Rate of Phishing Attacks?
Finally, it is also important to measure the average percentage of employees who are relatively easily exposed to phishing attacks. This includes them clicking on unverified links or downloading harmful files.
This will give you a clear idea of the current state of your organization and what approach you should take to increase your employees’ awareness of cyber hygiene and security efforts.
What Kinds of Cybersecurity Exercises Are There?
Now that you have an understanding of what metrics to measure let’s get an overview of different cybersecurity exercises that can help you boost your security posture and enhance your overall cyber resilience.
- Live-Fire Exercise is designed to assist professionals in simulating and practicing defending against real-world cyber threats and attacks. This is where the entire team comes together to practice their technical skills in effectively responding to cyber incidents.This exercise consists of Red vs Blue team elements, and it aims to provide participants with a realistic experience to give them a thorough understanding of what a cyber attack looks like.
- Threat Hunting Exercise is where experts come together to collaboratively find and stop threats in a simulated environment. They are actively looking for evidence of suspicious activities like computer viruses and attempts to steal information.This exercise is mostly used to practice the team’s ability to collaborate and use various tools to hunt for potential threats.
- Capture-The-Flag (CTF) is a competition where participants aim to find and exploit computer system vulnerabilities to “capture a flag,” which can be a specific piece of information or a code hidden within a system.This exercise aims to provide a challenging experience for the participants to develop and refine their skills in a controlled environment.
CybExer Technologies – Learning the Way to Cyber Preparedness
When it comes to successfully conducting cybersecurity exercises to get positive results for your team, it is important to embrace innovative training solutions like Cyber Ranges, which help you educate your team and enhance their cyber preparedness.
CybExer Technologies has been a driving force in the cybersecurity landscape since 2016. Our platform has been continuously assisting enterprises with comprehensive cybersecurity training modules designed to elevate their readiness against ever-evolving cyber attacks.
If you’d like to learn more about our products and offerings, make sure to schedule a call with our cybersecurity experts to discuss your organization’s needs.
