Security Metrics: Replacing Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt

The Definitive Guide to Quantifying, Classifying, and Measuring Enterprise IT Security Operations

Security Metrics is the first comprehensive best-practice guide to defining, creating, and utilizing security metrics in the enterprise.

Using sample charts, graphics, case studies, and war stories, Yankee Group Security Expert Andrew Jaquith demonstrates exactly how to establish effective metrics based on your organization’s unique requirements. You’ll discover how to quantify hard-to-measure security activities, compile and analyze all relevant data, identify strengths and weaknesses, set cost-effective priorities for improvement, and craft compelling messages for senior management.

Security Metrics successfully bridges management’s quantitative viewpoint with the nuts-and-bolts approach typically taken by security professionals. It brings together expert solutions drawn from Jaquith’s extensive consulting work in the software, aerospace, and financial services industries, including new metrics presented nowhere else. You’ll learn how to:

• Replace nonstop crisis response with a systematic approach to security improvement

• Understand the differences between “good” and “bad” metrics

• Measure coverage and control, vulnerability management, password quality, patch latency, benchmark scoring, and business-adjusted risk

• Quantify the effectiveness of security acquisition, implementation, and other program activities

• Organize, aggregate, and analyze your data to bring out key insights

• Use visualization to understand and communicate security issues more clearly

• Capture valuable data from firewalls and antivirus logs, third-party auditor reports, and other resources

• Implement balanced scorecards that present compact, holistic views of organizational security effectiveness

Whether you’re an engineer or consultant responsible for security and reporting to management–or an executive who needs better information for decision-making–Security Metrics is the resource you have been searching for.

Andrew Jaquith, program manager for Yankee Group’s Security Solutions and Services Decision Service, advises enterprise clients on prioritizing and managing security resources. He also helps security vendors develop product, service, and go-to-market strategies for reaching enterprise customers. He co-founded @stake, Inc., a security consulting pioneer acquired by Symantec Corporation in 2004. His application security and metrics research has been featured in CIO, CSO, InformationWeek, IEEE Security and Privacy, and The Economist.

Foreword         

Preface            

Acknowledgments         

About the Author           

Chapter 1          Introduction: Escaping the Hamster Wheel of Pain          

Chapter 2          Defining Security Metrics           

Chapter 3          Diagnosing Problems and Measuring Technical Security  

Chapter 4          Measuring Program Effectiveness           

Chapter 5          Analysis Techniques     

Chapter 6          Visualization     

Chapter 7          Automating Metrics Calculations

Chapter 8          Designing Security Scorecards  

Index