I am not suggesting the metrics are meaningless, I am suggesting everything else you need to do not covered under these or nist csf becomes lower priority or ev

I am not suggesting the metrics are meaningless, I am suggesting everything else you need to do not covered under these or nist csf becomes lower priority or even seen as wasteful. In case you are not aware if it look up "mcnamara fallacy", a phenomena I have seen many times in corporate infosec, measurement itself is (wrongly) the goal instead of understanding and interpreting the measurement. Check this: > Number of malicious domain requests blocked. Does this mean your domain reputation system sucks if that number goes down or does it mean you are cleaning up your assetts well? If you knew for certain they were malicious, and didn't block them, that is what it is meant to capture but in reality a downward linechart is all that is needed to fulfill the metric. > Increase in the number of cybersecurity students trained in courses offered or funded by CISA. > Increase in the percentage of cybersecurity courses offered or funded by CISA that target underrepresented populations. The few "cyber security" grads I have seen start their career knew less than a helpdesk analyst. From well reputed colleges! Where is the qualitative metric? > Reduction in our time-to-detect adversary activity affecting federal agencies and critical infrastructure partners. Which adversaries? So, if defender remediates 10000 malware infection attempts within a day and you have 2 APTs with 90day+ dwell time, how does this work out? How does one's efforts to reduce APT dwell time fit in? > Reduction in the time-to-remediation across each identified intrusion This seems like a good idea on the surface but really, it should be time-to-containment. The IRL impact is, analysts will rush to remediate without properly analyzing and scoping the compromise. So long as the containment was effective and the eradication time is not unreasonable, who cares? The worst APTs are very hard to contain if you don't take your time to analyze their behavior, even containment is discourages in certain contexts to avoid tipping them off. But stepping back a bit, I am with you that some of the metrics (especially around vulnmgmt) are solid. Lack of details, what isn't said and lack of emphasis on understanding are what make this harmful if taken as-is. For an org like the US government, I can see how this can be a good set of metrics for governmental departments and agencies, to enforce some reasonable level of security posture, expecting security teams to go beyond this and implement a much better set of goals and metrics according to their resources. But in the corporate world, this becomes the helm that drives the ship. You have one security org in the company and managers look bad when resources are spent doing things that don't help this metric and analysts "make" their numbers, unable to change deficiencies they see day to day that could help management understand the metrics (because that isn't the goal, the metric alone is the goal!).