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Your Security Vendor May Not Be Telling You the Truth About Your MTTD - Here's Why

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Your Security Vendor May Not Be Telling You the Truth About Your MTTD - Here's Why

Many security vendors report Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) by starting the clock after logs are received and processed, rather than from the first observable attacker activity, which inflates detection speed metrics. Accurate MTTD measurement should begin when suspicious or malicious events first occur and end when an alert triggers, giving security leaders a true picture of detection capabilities across their entire stack. Inconsistent MTTD definitions across vendors prevent meaningful performance comparison and obscure real exposure windows that attackers can exploit.

Why it matters: Security leaders evaluating vendors and detection tools need to understand how MTTD is calculated, as inflated metrics based on log ingestion rather than first activity create false confidence in detection speed and delay visibility into genuine risk exposure.

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research

Your Security Vendor May Not Be Telling You the Truth About Your MTTD - Here's Why

Many security vendors report Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) by starting the clock after logs are received and processed, rather than from the first observable attacker activity, which inflates detection speed metrics. Accurate MTTD measurement should begin when suspicious or malicious events first occur and end when an alert triggers, giving security leaders a true picture of detection capabilities across their entire stack. Inconsistent MTTD definitions across vendors prevent meaningful performance comparison and obscure real exposure windows that attackers can exploit.

Why it matters: Security leaders evaluating vendors and detection tools need to understand how MTTD is calculated, as inflated metrics based on log ingestion rather than first activity create false confidence in detection speed and delay visibility into genuine risk exposure.

Source published
First seen by Cybersecurity Tracker

Source attribution

Glossary