Is Defense Winning? A Look at Decades of Playing Catch-up

Preview of Jason Healey’s Black Hat USA 2024 presentation proposing that the cybersecurity community adopt measurable, macro-level indicators—akin to climate metrics—to determine whether defense is improving relative to offense; he urges using existing data sources and time-series metrics (e.g., MTTD, dwell time, mean time between catastrophes) and setting concrete targets such as reducing detection and dwell time to under 24 hours by 2030 to drive systemic defensive improvements.