The Truth About Threat Intelligence Metrics and How to Measure and Prove Security Value

Let's address one of the biggest elephants in the security conference room: measuring the true value of threat intelligence is one of the hardest challenges cybersecurity teams face today. While vendors might promise incredible threat intelligence metrics and clear ROI calculations, the real world is far more complex. And that's exactly why we need to have an honest conversation about what these metrics can and cannot tell you.

In an industry obsessed with catastrophic breach statistics and doomsday scenarios, Adam Darrah, Vice President of Intelligence at ZeroFox advocates for a fundamentally different approach—one grounded in reality rather than paranoia.

"I don't believe in fear mongering," states Adam, cutting straight to one of cybersecurity's biggest problems. "People are nervous enough about everything going on in the world. And the last thing I want them to think of when they think about cybersecurity is, oh, another thing I have to be worried about or be scared of."

The VP of Intelligence’s refreshingly honest perspective challenges the conventional narrative surrounding security value, but he goes even further. 

"Cybersecurity is a bit of a peculiar industry in that we look at what the victim did ‘wrong’," Adam observes. "It's strange that we tend to blame the good guys for what bad guys do. When an organization suffers a cyber breach, the immediate response is often to scrutinize what the victim did wrong.”

Adam argues that this victim-blaming mentality has affected how we think about threat intelligence metrics. We chase impossible standards, demand perfect prevention rates, and create metrics that set security operations teams up for failure. 

But what if we're measuring the wrong things entirely?

Here's the uncomfortable truth that most vendors won't tell you: "Whether it’s ransomware, extortion, a misconfigured server, or a third party leaking your data, a data breach is inevitable," Adam states matter-of-factly. Before you panic, understand that this isn't meant to frighten—it's simply acknowledging reality. 

"The biggest brands on planet earth with the most advanced security have all been attacked, whether that’s by a nation state affiliated adversary, a common criminal, or a really smart kid who accidentally discovers a vulnerability."

Complicating this picture even further is the fact that even locking down your internal networks with iron-clad cybersecurity isn’t enough. In the modern business environment, every organization’s digital attack surface extends across a vast range of third-party spaces, from social networks and digital marketplaces to the dark web. These open up new vulnerabilities beyond the traditional security perimeter, such as brand impersonations, cybersquatting, or account takeover attacks.

“Password reuse means people are still breaking into accounts from data that's almost 10 years old, like from the 2016 LinkedIn data breach,” Adam points out. 

“Maybe we don’t know we’ve been compromised or we forget that we used that password 10 years ago; so, we use that password again because it's easy to remember”

If breaches are a certainty even for the world's most sophisticated organizations, then our entire approach to measuring threat intelligence value needs to change. Instead of pretending we can achieve perfect security through the right metrics dashboard, we need to focus on what actually matters: reducing frequency, minimizing impact, and building resilience.

This article takes a hard look at why traditional threat intelligence metrics fail, what measurements actually matter, and how to build a realistic framework for demonstrating security value—without the fear, without the blame, and without the impossible promises. It's time for an honest conversation about what threat intelligence can and cannot do, and how to measure its true worth in a world where perfect security doesn't exist.

Why Traditional Threat Intelligence Metrics Fall Short

Most organizations approach threat intelligence metrics with the best intentions. They want to justify spend, demonstrate value to executives, and ensure they're getting the protection they need. But here's what typically happens: security teams get bogged down hunting for metrics that look impressive on paper but don't actually measure what matters.

The Challenge of Quantifying Cybersecurity Value

Consider this oft-reported statistic: according to industry estimates, and factoring in reputational damage, theft, fraud, and the manpower needed to handle increased customer service demands, in 2024 the average cost of a data breach was approximately $4.9M, the highest total ever. 

This raises an important question for cybersecurity providers: How do we use this to demonstrate our value to clients?

The Flawed Calculation

One might be tempted to use simple multiplication: If we've protected 10,000 credentials from exposure, and each breach costs $4.9 million, does that mean we've saved the client $49 billion? This calculation is clearly problematic and unrealistic.

The Real Challenge

From an operational standpoint, accurately measuring prevented losses is extremely difficult because:

1. Lack of data: Clients often don't know what breaches they've avoided or what the actual impact would have been
2. Attribution difficulty: It's hard to prove that specific security measures prevented specific breaches
3. Client transparency: Corporations don't want to share accurate breach data metrics for good reasons

The Opportunity

While this presents a practical challenge for sales teams and account managers, it represents an important area for increased transparency in the cybersecurity industry. The question of how to accurately value prevention and risk mitigation remains largely unsolved and deserves serious attention from industry leaders.

ZeroFox’s Vice President of Intelligence explains the challenge is that, even when organizations do see value, accurate figures are normally kept in house: "I've been told many times through the years: ‘Oh, hey, thanks for that. You just saved us millions of dollars’, but clients never say anything beyond that. They won't or can’t let us know the specific details and we respect that."

An additional problem comes down to basic logic: Proving threat intelligence value requires demonstrating the cost of something that didn't happen. It's similar to measuring the value of insurance before you need to file a claim. You know protection is essential, but quantifying its worth remains frustratingly elusive until that critical moment arrives.

The Quantity vs. Quality Trap

One of the most common misconceptions about threat intelligence metrics is that more data equals better protection. Security teams often hear complaints like "Your competitor sends us twice as many alerts" or "We're not getting as much data as the other vendor provides." 

"Even large, established companies get excited when they see even a 3-5 percent differential in data,” Adam reveals. “Clients will say things like, ‘Oh, wow, we saw a five percent differential, that's amazing!'"

“But here's a crucial detail: All credible North American, European, or Middle East-based providers, get about 90 to 95 percent of the same data. And what those comparisons miss is that, in the threat intelligence world, quality trumps quantity every single time.”

Just having access to more threat intelligence isn’t enough, it’s how you process and analyze that really counts: “Leadership teams tend to be biased to the idea that more equals better,” says Adam. 

“But you know what? Better is also better. For security operations teams, on the line doing the best firefighting they can, a high quality vetted data feed that is compatible with their SIEM is much more critical for mitigating risk.”

Think about it this way: would you rather receive 10,000 alerts where 9,500 are noise, or 500 alerts where each one represents a genuine threat requiring action? 

What Real-World Threat Intelligence Success Looks Like

Instead of chasing superficial metrics, let's examine what actually matters. Real threat intelligence value emerges in those critical moments when early warning prevents catastrophe.

Adam shares a powerful example of how ZeroFox’s unique expertise and dark web monitoring benefit clients: “We maintain a presence in special places that allows us to acquire inventory and take freshly compromised data off the market as quickly as we can.”

“Quite recently, through relationships on the dark web, we discovered access to one of our major client's networks was being brokered in known ransomware gang communities,” Adam explains.

“This is a great brand and company. We immediately moved and got the breached credentials off the ransomware radar. We probably saved them tens of millions of dollars simply by keeping our ear to the ground and acting decisively."

But here's another challenge when it comes to collecting threat intelligence metrics: such victories often remain invisible. When threat intelligence helps an organization understand emerging threat actor tactics, adjust security controls proactively, or identify previously unknown vulnerabilities in their attack surface, the value is real but difficult to express in traditional terms. An absence of incidents doesn't make for compelling dashboards, yet it represents the ultimate threat intelligence success metric.

“It's a multi-layered approach to protecting the entire footprint of a brand to mitigate and reduce risk in as much as that's humanly possible. But that's a hard thing to quantify," Adam admits.

The Metrics That Actually Matter

While perfect ROI calculations may be impossible, certain threat intelligence metrics provide genuine insight into your security posture. Because alert quality matters far more than alert quantity, the key is focusing on measurements that reflect real-world impact rather than amassing datasets of raw numbers. 

For example, instead of measuring total data points collected, assess how well your threat intelligence covers the specific threat vectors that matter to your organization. This may include brand impersonation detection rates, executive protection coverage, domain monitoring comprehensiveness, and visibility into dark web activities specific to your industry. 

The best threat intelligence metrics focus on outcomes, not inputs, so other valuable measurement areas include mean time to remediation, takedown success rates, and threat actor disruption effectiveness. Such measurements show whether your threat intelligence translates into meaningful security improvements.

Addressing Modern Threat Realities

Surprisingly, when it comes to criminal transactions such as selling network exploits or stolen data, there is actually a little honor among typical cybercriminals. 

"Reputational currency is of almost equal value to monetary currency in ‘legitimate’ criminal circles on the dark web," Adam explains. 

"So, for the sake of their future business, they don't want to be the one that snitches or double crosses a buyer. Also, they’re busy, so they just move on once they’ve made their money."

However, the modern threat landscape hides actors far beyond these traditional financially-driven hackers. Successful companies are increasingly tempting targets for nation state actors who operate with fundamentally different motivations.

"The nation state actors, they don't care,” Adam warns. 

“Often, they just want to embarrass us by making a national economic champion or brand look silly for geopolitical reasons."

This evolution in threat actors requires a corresponding shift in how we think about the effectiveness of threat intelligence. Traditional metrics designed for commodity malware and opportunistic attacks fail to capture the value of intelligence that helps defend against advanced persistent threats, supply chain compromises, or targeted disinformation campaigns.

The rapid convergence of cyber and physical threats adds another layer of complexity. "The cyber and real world meet all the time now, and then things can get evil and turn ugly quite quickly," Adam notes. When threat intelligence uncovers threats to employee safety, identifies plans for protests at corporate facilities, or prevents an executive kidnapping attempt, how do you quantify that value?

Building a Realistic Threat Intelligence Metrics Framework

Given these realities, how should organizations approach threat intelligence metrics? The answer lies in building a framework that acknowledges the limitations of such measurements.

Start by focusing on risk reduction ahead of ROI calculations. Adam explains that, since breaches are sadly inevitable, the goal becomes “Making sure these incidents don't happen as often. Maybe, we can aim to push it out to once every two or three years."

Increased operational efficiency can then provide another valuable lens for measurement. Effective threat intelligence should make your security team more capable and productive. Consider tracking analyst performance improvements, reductions in investigation times, decreases in alert fatigue, and improvements in cross-team collaboration. These metrics demonstrate how threat intelligence amplifies your existing security investments.

Documentation of success stories, while anecdotal, carries significant weight with executives and board members. Capture real-world examples of threat prevention, proactive threat hunting success, incident response support, and brand reputation protection to make the value of threat intelligence tangible in ways that abstract metrics cannot.

Perhaps most importantly, align your threat intelligence metrics with business objectives. "What tends to resonate with executive leadership teams is to explain risks in terms of more familiar concepts, like brand protection,” Adam advises. 

“So, preparing to mitigate and limit the fallout from an inevitable data incident of some kind, a leakage, a breach, a ransomware attack, an extortion, is all part of protecting your brand."

The People Behind Threat Intelligence

Automated systems alone cannot provide the context, analysis, and strategic insights that transform raw data into actionable intelligence. The best threat intelligence combines advanced technology with experienced analysts who understand your industry, threat landscape, and specific risks. That’s why, at ZeroFox, behind every meaningful threat intelligence metric stands human expertise. 

"We differentiate ourselves in a number of ways to give our clients a better than fighting chance to defend themselves," Adam notes. These include the ability to inform organizations about threats with "some enlightened context around what's going outside their networks, from helping brands understand who is talking about their data to identifying which underground actors are offering tools aimed at the systems they use."

ZeroFox’s approach also embraces the philosophy of education over intimidation that forward-thinking security leaders advocate. This means that, rather than overwhelming clients with scary statistics, the focus should be on providing actionable intelligence that helps organizations make informed decisions.

"We proactively educate clients around proper cyber hygiene to help mitigate the severity of incidents such as data breaches, or data extortion or exfiltration events," Adam says. 

Maximize Your Threat Intelligence with ZeroFox

The hard truth about threat intelligence metrics is that they'll never tell the complete story. Organizations that succeed with threat intelligence take a mature view of metrics. They focus on increasing resilience, reducing risk, and creating sustainable security practices. Most importantly, they recognize that the absence of incidents—while difficult to measure—represents the ultimate success. 

Instead of chasing impossible ROI calculations or comparing alert volumes among competitors, focus on building a threat intelligence program that provides:

• Comprehensive visibility across your external attack surface
• Expert analysis and context for emerging threats
• Rapid takedown capabilities for critical incidents
• Strategic intelligence for long-term planning

Honest vendors won't promise you perfect metrics or guaranteed ROI. What they will provide is transparency about their capabilities, evidence of their expertise, and a partnership approach to protecting your organization in an increasingly complex threat landscape.

ZeroFox's comprehensive threat intelligence solutions provide the visibility, context, and actionable insights needed to protect your organization from external threats. Our platform leverages a team of over 100 global analysts armed with advanced AI analytics, digital risk protection, full-spectrum threat intelligence, and a robust portfolio of takedown capabilities to help you stay ahead of adversaries.

Whether you need help enhancing your existing program or rolling out a comprehensive security solution, take the next step in building an effective threat intelligence program by requesting a demo today.