Cyber-attacks are growing by the day, with web applications being the prime target. What’s more concerning is that 98% of web applications are vulnerable to attacks it can take an average of 287 days to detect and contain a data breach.
Therefore, knowing how to keep web applications safeguarded from threat actors can enable CISOs and IT leaders to protect their web assets better. While there are many ways to ensure security of an application, knowing where to begin can get daunting. Therefore, one of the best ways is to analyze the key performance indicators (KPIs) that reveal the website’s health, allow the IT team to identify vulnerabilities in time, and improve the website’s performance.
7 website application KPIs to track to keep vulnerabilities at bay
- Number of vulnerabilities and their severity
There are two primary ways to check for any web vulnerability—automated vulnerability scanning tools and manual methods like penetration testing. It is important to classify these vulnerabilities based on their severity, associated risk, and impact so the IT team knows which ones to prioritize instead of being alarmed by every vulnerability.
2. False-Positives and False-Negatives
A false-positive means your web app shows a vulnerability when there is none in reality, while a false-negative is the opposite—it does not show a vulnerability when it is present. Thus, it is important that you do not ignore such reports and carry out repeat checks and crosschecks. This ensures your business is safeguarded from potential attacks and huge losses.
3. Meantime to Detect Vulnerabilities
This is an important metric to ensure vulnerabilities are not going unnoticed in your web applications.
To do this, IT team should track how long it takes to analyze forensic data, such as system log entries, system files, and network traffic. This will help identify areas for improvement and take timely actions to protect your company’s sensitive data.
4. Meantime between Discovery & Remediation
If you find out the meantime it takes your team to cover the duration from discovery to remediation for a cyber attack, it will help streamline and improve your response process on data breaches, data leaks, cyber-attacks, and security incidents. Therefore, it is an essential KPI to watch out for.
5. Time to Restore Vulnerabilities
The development team’s nimbleness and efficiency in remediating vulnerabilities are important in ensuring the security of web applications. Hackers constantly identify and target vulnerabilities online and spare no chance to attack as soon as they find one. Thus, it is critical to focus on lowering the repair time frame and optimizing the performance of applications.
6. Zero-Day Attacks
These are the most destructive threats because hackers can exploit vulnerabilities even before the developer or any IT team member has had a chance to identify them. Thus, detecting zero-day attacks in a timely manner is crucial. Ultimately, a web application firewall (WAF) can help you stop these attacks by spotting malicious traffic and blocking it from entering your network.
7. Historical data
Most security professionals spend their time analyzing current activities or taking reactive steps. However, by using emerging technologies like machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI), IT professionals can analyze historical data to identify patterns in cyber threats. This can help businesses stay one step ahead of cybercriminals.
Conclusion
The above metrics are a good starting point, however, each business is unique, and as a result, they should track metrics that are most relevant to them. Finally, analyzing these KPIs will allow businesses to identify the most crucial vulnerabilities, strengthen their security posture, improve compliance, and reduce the risk of data breaches.
(The author is Mr. Shibu Paul, Vice President – International Sales at Array Networks, and the views expressed in this article are his own)
