easyMultiple Choice
CISM Practice Question: An incident response plan (IRP) is being tested
An incident response plan (IRP) is being tested. Which metric is MOST indicative of the team's effectiveness during an exercise?
⚠ Common exam trap
ISACA's CISM exam emphasizes that detection speed (MTTD) is the primary indicator of proactive incident response capability, not operational metrics like cost or log volume.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Mean time to detect (MTTD)
Mean time to detect (MTTD) is the most indicative metric of team effectiveness during an IRP exercise because it directly measures how quickly the team identifies a security incident. A lower MTTD reflects faster detection, which is critical for minimizing dwell time and limiting attacker impact. In contrast, cost, tool count, or log volume do not measure detection speed or response quality.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Total cost of the exercise
Why it's wrong here
Exercise cost reflects budget and resource consumption, not whether the team executed detection, containment and recovery steps correctly. It tempts because cost justifies programme funding, but an IRP test measures response performance; spend is an input, whereas containment and recovery times are the effectiveness indicators.
- ✗
Number of tools used
Why it's wrong here
Counting tools measures resource consumption, not whether the team contained, eradicated and recovered within the plan's objectives. It is tempting because tooling inventories are easy to tabulate, and the count would be relevant when justifying capability investment, but effectiveness is evidenced by detection, response and containment times against exercise targets.
- ✓
Mean time to detect (MTTD)
Why this is correct
Mean time to detect measures how quickly the team identifies incidents during the exercise, directly reflecting monitoring, triage and escalation effectiveness. Detection speed is the clearest indicator of response capability, since containment and recovery metrics depend on the incident being found first.
- ✗
Volume of logs generated
Why it's wrong here
Log volume reflects telemetry verbosity and retention settings, not how well the team detected, triaged or contained the simulated incident. It tempts because logging is a recognised detective control, yet volume alone says nothing about analyst decisions; exercise effectiveness is measured by outcome metrics such as mean time to contain.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This CISM practice question is part of Courseiva's free ISACA certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the CISM exam.