After over 25 years of mitigating risks, ensuring compliance, and building robust security programs for Fortune 500 companies, it has become apparent that looking busy is not the same as being secure. This is a trap that many busy cybersecurity leaders fall into, relying on metrics that tell a story of the tremendous efforts being expended, such as the number of vulnerabilities patched or the speed of response, rather than actual risk reduction.

Traditional approaches to measuring and implementing vulnerability management often associate vulnerability management metrics with operational metrics, which can be misleading. This leads to a focus on reporting the number of patches applied under the traditional 30/60/90-day patching method, rather than actually reducing risk.

These metrics are referred to as vanity metrics: numbers that look impressive in reports but lack real-world impact, offering reassurance but not insights. Meanwhile, threats continue to grow more sophisticated, and attackers exploit the blind spots that are not being measured. This disconnect between measurement and meaning can leave organizations exposed.

In this article, the focus will be on explaining why vanity metrics are not enough to protect today’s complex environments and why it’s time to stop measuring activity and start measuring effectiveness.

Understanding Vanity Metrics

Vanity metrics are numbers that look good in a report but offer little strategic value. They are easy to track, simple to present, and are often used to demonstrate activity, but they don’t usually reflect actual risk reduction. Vanity metrics typically fall into three main types:

• Volume metrics – These count things, such as patches applied, vulnerabilities discovered, or scans completed. They create a sense of productivity but don’t speak to business impact or risk relevance.
• Time-based metrics without risk context – Metrics like Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) or Mean Time to Remediate (MTTR) can sound impressive, but without prioritization based on criticality, speed is just the “how,” not the “what.”
• Coverage metrics – Percentages like “95% of assets scanned” or “90% of vulnerabilities patched” give an illusion of control, but they ignore the question of which 5% were missed and whether they’re the ones that matter most.

Vanity metrics aren’t inherently wrong, but they’re dangerously incomplete. They track motion, not meaning, and if they’re not tied to threat relevance or business-critical assets, they can quietly undermine the entire security strategy.

The Dangers of Relying on Vanity Metrics

When vanity metrics dominate security reporting, they may do more harm than good. Organizations can burn through time and budget chasing numbers that look great in executive briefings, while critical exposures are left untouched.

What goes wrong when relying on vanity metrics?

• Misallocated effort – Teams focus on what’s easy to fix or what moves a metric, not what truly reduces risk, creating a dangerous gap between what’s done and what needs to be done.
• False confidence – Upward-trending charts can mislead leadership into believing the organization is secure, without context on exploitability, attack paths, or business impact.
• Broken prioritization – Massive vulnerability lists without context cause fatigue, and high-risk issues can easily get lost in the noise, delaying remediation where it matters most.
• Strategic stagnation – When reporting rewards activity over impact, innovation slows, and the program becomes reactive, always busy but not always safer.

Breaches can occur in environments full of glowing KPIs because those KPIs aren’t tied to reality. A metric that doesn’t reflect actual business risk isn’t just meaningless; it’s dangerous.

Moving Towards Meaningful Metrics

If vanity metrics tell us what’s been done, meaningful metrics tell us what matters. They shift the focus from activity to impact, giving security teams and business leaders a shared understanding of actual risk.

A meaningful metric starts with a clear formula: risk = likelihood × impact. It doesn’t just ask “What vulnerabilities exist?” but “Which of these can be exploited to reach our most critical assets, and what would the consequences be?” To make the shift to meaningful metrics, consider anchoring your reporting around five key metrics:

1. Risk score (tied to business impact) – A meaningful risk score weighs exploitability, asset criticality, and potential impact, evolving dynamically as exposures change or as threat intelligence shifts.
2. Critical asset exposure (tracked over time) – Not all assets are equal. Knowing which business-critical systems are currently exposed and how that exposure is trending shows whether the security program is actually closing the right gaps.
3. Attack path mapping – Vulnerabilities don’t exist in isolation.
   Source Link