How To Measure Cybersecurity?

Let us learn how to measure cybersecurity? And What is the importance of measuring cybersecurity?

Introduction About To Measure Cybersecurity

Cybersecurity is a difficult and complicated issue. There are no standards in the security industry that dictate. Especially, which tools, processes, and procedures to use to keep your organization safe from cyberattacks. As such, there is no single way to measure cybersecurity.

So how can we measure our cybersecurity? Let us see in the following paragraphs.

How To Measure Cybersecurity?

Let us learn how to measure cybersecurity? What are the best practices for measuring it?

Step 1: Identify Your Goals and Objectives

Before you start measuring cybersecurity, you need to identify your goals and objectives. These goals and objectives will form the basis of your measurements.

For example, if your objective is “to reduce malware infections by 50 percent,”. Then you will want to measure the number of malware infections that occur in your network.

You might also want to measure the number of malware infections that were successfully blocked by your antivirus software. This allows you to gauge how effective your anti-virus software is at fighting off malware infections.

Also, it gives you an idea about how many infections would have occurred if you didn’t have any anti-virus software at all.

Step 2: Decide on Your Metrics

Once you know what you want to measure, it’s time to decide on the metrics that will be used for each measurement. There are a variety of metrics that you can use when measuring cybersecurity events.

So some are better than others depending on what type of data you need to collect. For example, it would not make sense to use the number of times users clicked on phishing emails as a metric because there is no way for them to do this.

Useful Metrics

The following list contains some useful metrics:

• Number of vulnerabilities found during penetration testing

• Counts of employees who clicked on phishing emails

• Number of malware infections reported across all platforms

• Total number of successful cyberattacks blocked by the web application firewall

• Number of employees who received phishing training

• Counts of times users clicked on suspicious links or attachments in email messages

• Number of cookies containing malware detected during network scans

Now that we have learned how to measure our cybersecurity, let us continue on the importance of it.

What is the Importance of Measuring Cybersecurity?

Measuring cybersecurity is important for a number of reasons.

• First, measuring cybersecurity helps us to keep our business safe from cyberattacks. So if you have a set of solid measures in place, you are likely to discover any holes or vulnerabilities in your security system and correct them.

So you could do it before they can be exploited.

• Measuring cybersecurity also helps ensure the success of your security program. In order to measure a cybersecurity program, you need to have specific goals in mind.
• Once you have identified these goals, they can be used to determine how successful your security efforts are.