The modern cybersecurity stack comprises numerous security solutions stitched together to safeguard organizations against an ever-growing threat landscape. The goal is simple: Keep the organization safe from a breach.
The common facet these solutions share is that they generate hundreds, even thousands, of alerts in a day, depending on the size of the environment. Some of these alerts are genuine, but many are false positives.
While these alerts are designed to protect organizations from threats, the sheer volume can lead to a phenomenon known as alert fatigue. This blog post delves into the complexities of alert fatigue, its causes, consequences, and strategies for mitigation.
Alert Fatigue Explained
Alert fatigue in cybersecurity refers to the process of desensitization that occurs when human security operations center (SOC) analysts are overwhelmed by a high volume of alerts. This cognitive overload develops gradually as analysts are exposed to a constant stream of alerts, many of which are false positives, low-priority issues, or alerts that lack context and yield wasted investigative effort.
The early symptoms of alert fatigue include lengthening response times and an increased likelihood of missing critical alerts. More serious long-term symptoms include a significant percentage of alerts not being triaged at all. Concerningly, a study indicates that it is commonplace for as many as 50% alerts to not be triaged in a day due to the sheer volume of alerts in relation to analyst capacity.
What Causes Alert Fatigue?
Several factors contribute to the development of alert fatigue:
- High alert volumes: As solution adoption grows to address threats, so do the alerts.
- High false positives: Poorly configured solutions fire irrelevant alerts.
- Poor quality alerts: Alerts that lack context.
- Overstretched security teams: Security teams are doing more with less, with a growing imbalance of the alert-to-analyst work ratio.
- High analyst turnover: Burnout leads to high analyst turnover, resulting in organizations continuously having to focus efforts on training new analysts.
The Consequences and Risks of Alert Fatigue
The immediate risk of alert fatigue is that SOC analysts become desensitized to alerts. This means the likelihood of missing or ignoring critical alerts increases. This can result in breaches going undetected for extended periods, allowing attackers to dwell and cause extensive damage.
The long-term consequences can be severe, including the loss of sensitive data, financial losses arising from the loss of customer trust, fines levied by regulators, as well as suffering irreparable reputational damage.
Missed or Ignored Alerts
With up to 50% of alerts not dealt with in a typical day translates into a high probability that high-priority alerts go unaddressed. There are numerous examples from Target to, Yahoo to Toyota, where breaches went undetected for years at a time with the damage difficult to quantify.
To address this challenge, organizations must implement more efficient alert triaging. This is where machine learning-powered SOC solutions in the form of AI agents can automatically recognize patterns, correlate, and prioritize alerts – significantly improving the efficiency of alert triage.
Slow Response Times
Delayed responses can turn a containable incident into a full-blown breach. Slow response times can also damage an organization's reputation, particularly in industries where rapid incident response is expected, for example in critical industries, including healthcare, financial services, and public utilities.
Organizations will benefit from adopting AI-powered SOC analysts to significantly improve response times by freeing analyst time to tackle urgent alerts.
Burnout
The constant pressure to investigate and respond to alerts can lead to SOC analyst burnout, with as many as 70% of SOC teams emotionally overwhelmed. Burnout is characterized by physical and emotional exhaustion from the continuous state of feeling overwhelmed. It is exacerbated by the high-stakes nature of missing an actual threat.
Organizations need to acknowledge that human-powered SOC teams are overwhelmed. By leveraging AI SOC analysts not only are response times sped up but the huge backlog of alerts is dealt with seamlessly through automating pattern recognition, alert correlation and prioritization at scale.
How to Mitigate Alert Fatigue
Mitigating alert fatigue requires a multi-faceted approach:
- Reducing alert volume: Alert tuning, consolidation of security tools, and event correlation are essential.
- Improving alert quality: This involves fine-tuning detection rules, leveraging threat intelligence to enhance context, and implementing risk-based alerting.
- Adopting AI SOC analysts: New AI SOC analysts enable Tier 1 SOC automation, significantly improving alert triage capacity.
By understanding its causes and consequences and implementing strategies and new technologies such as AI SOC analysts to mitigate alert fatigue, security teams can get on the front-foot of alerts in the face of an ever-growing threat landscape.
Alert Fatigue FAQs
1. How does Dropzone AI help in reducing alert fatigue?
Dropzone AI is trained to function as Tier 1 SOC analysts to augment your human analysts. It leverages the power of pre-trained AI security agents, replicates expert human analysts’ decision-making process, and performs end-to-end investigations autonomously, determining if an alert is malicious or not. It then presents the human analysts with detailed and actionable investigative reports.
By analyzing 100% of alerts, automating routine Tier 1 investigations, intelligently prioritizing threats, and enabling security teams to focus on high impact alerts, it helps combat alert fatigue.
2. What features of Dropzone AI are designed to improve alert quality?
Contextual enrichment: Dropzone AI includes several features to enrich the context and conclude investigations with high precision. These include:
- Extensive integrations: Seamlessly integrates with your security tools and data stack to understand your full security and organizational context.
- Context knowledge base: Leverages your systems' unstructured organizational context (such as past tickets and existing documentation) in your investigations and chats to improve alert analysis.
- Context inquiry: Conducts interviews with the parties involved to triangulate findings.
Investigation reports: Provides recommendations in the form of a detailed report with severity conclusion, executive summaries, and key evidence, making it easier for human analysts to make informed and strategic decisions.
3. How does automation in Dropzone AI minimize the impact of alert fatigue?
Dropzone AI analyzes events in a matter of minutes, guaranteeing that no alert goes unaddressed. By automating routine tasks like triage and initial investigation it empowers security teams to rapidly focus on the threats that matter while also reducing burnout risk.
4. Can Dropzone AI integrate with existing SOC tools to help mitigate alert fatigue?
Yes. Dropzone AI offers over 50+ integrations, including integrations with leading cybersecurity solutions, ticketing, and data tools. For a complete list of integrations, click here.
5. What are the success stories of organizations using Dropzone AI to combat alert fatigue?
Dropzone AI is helping numerous organizations today by transforming their security operations with the power of AI. The common outcomes Dropzone AI customers see include:
- Reduction on MTTD
- Significantly improved focus on actual threats that matter
- Reduced alert fatigue
- Freeing analysts for higher-value work
- Get more return on investment (ROI) from existing security tooling
View the case study here to learn how a major Insurance company saved their SOC analysts more than 40 minutes per alert investigation with Dropzone AI.