Benefits Of Adopting Decision Intelligence In Your Soc Team
The collective knowledge of the most experienced analysts of the SOC team is aggregated in AI-Assisted Cybersecurity. Not only is the tool capable of assisting based on the experiences of your non-AI teams, but the tool can also learn as it goes. An AI-Assisted Cybersecurity relies not only on historical data and team behavior to manage alerts but is also augmented with context through analyst feedback. Thus, the tool offers a deeper skillset to your team of experts
At the Decision Stage, based upon the data available and knowledge embedded into the model to AI-Assisted Cybersecurity, the model makes an automated decision to either escalate or drop an alert. This is presented to analysts and drastically reduces the number of false alerts that SOC analysts chase down and allows for attention to be given to legitimate breaches and cybersecurity concerns.
Since the AI-Assisted Cybersecurity represents all of the experts who have provided input to the AI model this will not only benefit the existing team, but also future analysts and the entire SOC team. This offers a safety net for new analysts and keeps critical business intelligence in-house. As well, it helps with staff turnover, promotions, as well as role changes to allow talented analysts to grow and advance within the organization.
Frustration About Receiving A New Alert
Whether because of sheer volume, low-quality information, or the plethora of other tasks to complete while remaining on-call, an alerts sound can immediately cause acute frustration in the alert-fatigued worker.
An alert is a warning signal of a problem. Ideally, it should spring you into a state of readiness to solve it. But if you feel intense anger or agitation, youre probably experiencing alert fatigue. This can make it nearly impossible to care about your application and put forth the effort necessary to resolve issues.
Use Thresholds And Ensure Theyre Set Appropriately
As mentioned, a single occurrence of an event may be considered low or medium criticality, but if that event occurs continuously or multiple times in a specified timeframe, the team may decide to configure an alert to trigger. Using thresholds to detect multiple occurrences of suspicious behavior can help significantly reduce the number of low-priority alerts and false positives being generated by your SIEM .
Oftentimes, organizations avoid setting thresholds for fear of missing important detections. If the team agrees one or two occurrences of an event is benign, but then collaborates to define the number of occurrences that warrants an investigation, they can implement the threshold and tune as necessary. This enables the team to collectively agree the alert is necessary and work to make it as valuable as possible while also ensuring the level of detection/prevention is appropriate.
Recommended Reading: Best Medicine For Chronic Fatigue
Prioritize And Normalize Logs To Decrease Alerts
While having extensive, well-kept logs is of the utmost importance for cybersecurity incident tracking, its not necessary for teams to be alerted about every new log item. Only the most critical alerts deserve their attention. Continuous reviews of whats important and whats not can keep the number of alerts down while providing a healthy gut-check on a companys overall security posture. An alert ideally provides a whole picture, not individual pieces especially when those individual piece alerts never add up to something bigger. If the organization is overwhelmed by the latter, normalization of logs into specific data types is a good initial step for cleaning that up. This could involve utilizing data models or strategies that dont require writing alerts for various systems.
Establish Defined Levels Of Criticality
If all alerts are presented in the same way, with the same sounds, the same presentation, or with the same level of priority, then its harder to sort the wheat from the chaff. So, consider adopting differing levels of criticality for different kinds of issues. Not only does this help you differentiate a minor snag from a red alert, it also gives you an opportunity to consider how each level of urgency is handled.
For example, do all alerts really need to be sent as emails, push notifications, and text messages? Or should that level of coverage be reserved for the real business-changing, all-hands-on-deck stuff? The more we are surrounded by notifications, the more we become desensitised to them, so make sure that urgent, genuine issues are easily discernible from minor notifications.
Recommended Reading: Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Rheumatoid Arthritis
What Is Cloud Security Alert Fatigue
Alert fatigue happens when security professionals are exposed to a large number of often meaningless, unprioritized security alerts and consequently become overwhelmed. Alert fatigue is a common problem in IT security and is no different in public cloud security.
Like the story of The Boy Who Cried Wolf, if the amount of meaningless and false positive alerts becomes too great, responders become desensitized, resulting in alerts that actually do deserve attention, getting missed.
How Securityscorecard Can Help
Clear, relevant and easy-to-read alerts are important when youre looking for actionable cybersecurity alerts.
SecurityScorecards Ratings are easy to read A-F scores that show you at a glance everything you need to know about your security posture from an outside-in perspective, context included. Our ratings continuously monitor metrics like endpoint security, network security, and application security, so you know what your vulnerabilities are, and can manage them in real-time. When you get an alert, we give you all the details you need, including a remediation plan for each issue. That information will allow your team to make a quick, well-informed decision about the alert and the threat itself.
Also Check: Weight Loss Loss Of Appetite Fatigue
Are You Fatigued By Cybersecurity Alerts
A lot of small businesses feel quite alone when it comes to cybersecurity. There are almost limitless blogs and guidance abound online, but sometimes you need input that relates to your own individual situation.
If this sounds familiar and if alarm-overwhelm is less of an annoyance and more of a constant reality why not consider Just Firewalls managed firewall service?
For an easily budgetable, monthly fee, our expert team will take all aspects of firewall management off your hands, including alert monitoring, day-to-day management, and technical support. Were priority partners with SonicWall and WatchGuard two indisputable industry leaders in firewall technology.
If you want managed security services that go beyond just firewalling, our colleagues at Just Cyber Security offer a full suite of Managed Security and Incident Response Services, taking all digital security worries off your hands.
Dont delay, learn more about Just Firewalls comprehensive managed firewall service today!
Why Does Alarm Fatigue Happen
Our brains are very good at tuning into alarm signals when danger may be imminent its essential for our survival. But when we receive the same danger notification time and time again, and 9 times out of 10 that alarm turns out to be something minor, we start tuning those alerts out, leaving our senses free to perceive other, real threats.
It was useful when we lived out in the wild, but its less useful in the digital age. Today were assaulted with digital notifications and its truly overwhelming. Eventually, all alerts get mentally tarred with the same brush as being low priority, even when theyre not. So, when an urgent, disastrous cybersecurity incident does arise, it could well slip through the net if the team are alarm-fatigued enough.
So, lets explore how you can minimise alert fatigue.
You May Like: How To Fight Lupus Fatigue
The Psychology Of Alarm Fatigue And Analyst Burnout
Alarm fatigue in cybersecurity causes a form of cognitive burnout in analysts leading to analytical desensitisation and reduced capability of a SOC team to perform to standard it affects not just the department but the individual.
In psychology, this is the phenomena known as Semantic Satiation, a possibly similar cognitive form of reactive inhibition. Semantic Satiation was first characterised in 1962 by Psychologist Leon Jakobovits James and is described as:
Repetition causes a word or phrase to temporarily lose meaning for the listener.
It can apply to looking at words, lengthy investigations and correlations too – the more youre exposed to a particular activity, the more you adapt, normalise and begin to disregard it based on past experience.
Ultimately, it means alarm fatigue results in semantic satiation, then sub-par detection, interpretation and response to critical attacks and alerts it is not where we want to be as a Managed Service Provider and certainly not for a SOC service, even an internal one.
Alert Fatigue Is Causing Burnout And Missed Critical Alerts
Orcas survey showed that public cloud security alert fatigue is a widespread problem with far reaching consequences, including turnover and missed critical alerts:
- Security teams are inundated with cloud security alerts: 59% of respondents receive more than 500 public cloud security alerts per day.
- Critical alerts are being missed: 55% of respondents said that critical alerts are being missed, often on a weekly and even daily basis.
- Alert fatigue causes turnover and internal friction: 62%of respondents say that alert fatigue has contributed to turnover, and 60% of respondents said that alert fatigue has created internal friction in their organization.
You May Like: What Does Sleep Apnea Fatigue Feel Like
What Is Cybersecurity Alert Fatigue And How Can You Escape It
Alerting is an essential function in cybersecurity. Alerts give you a heads up that something needs your attention immediately, so they play an essential role in keeping your organisation safe.
However, if your alert logic is misconfigured or you have layered on new reporting tools as your company has grown and developed, it can lead to a specific kind of sensory overwhelm. Where your alerts are chiefly false positives, unactionable notifications, and pedestrian requests for simple inputs, they start to lose urgency.
This is a phenomenon called alarm fatigue or alert fatigue.
Ways To Avoid Cyber Security Alert Fatigue And False Positives
Todays cyber security professionals often struggle with security alert fatigue. They use more tools to defend more systems than ever before, resulting in an overwhelming number of potential security threat alerts that require investigation. Teams are left feeling overworked and exhausted as they struggle to sort through high volumes of information to spot the real cyber risks and concerns that threaten their business operations, reputation, and data.
Each security alert creates more noise that security professionals have to manage and, eventually, they may begin to tune it out. But, just like the story of the boy who cried wolf, this is where the real danger lies. When exhaustion sets in and cyber security teams struggle to pay attention to alerts, the real cyber threats slip past unnoticed.
The good news? By understanding cyber security alert fatigue and why false positives happen in the first place, you and your team can stay focused on the issues and concerns that matter most to your business.
Read Also: Unexplained Weight Loss And Fatigue
How Does Alert Fatigue Impact Cybersecurity
In addition to healthcare and construction, the tech field is one of the industries most plagued by alert fatigue. Software tools like antimalware, antivirus, threat response systems, and others constantly alert MSPs of suspicious activity or malicious files threatening their clients systems.
Although its important to be on high alert with the growing number of cyber-attacks in the modern digital business world, too many insignificant alerts may drown out the more critical notifications. Its essential for MSPs and other IT professionals to be aware of alert fatigue and take whatever measures are necessary to minimize system alerts.
An incoming flood of notifications leading to missed cybersecurity alerts is not a hard connection to make. Were sure anyone in the IT field can attest to how bad the problem of alert fatigue can get. What most IT admins dont know is that alarm fatigue can actually have some pretty significant consequences outside of the technical aspect.
It may be an afterthought, but if alert fatigue goes unchecked, it can lead to HR problems within your team. IT staffers who are continuously overwhelmed with notifications and alerts may choose to leave in search of other employment.
Relying on your team to process too many system alerts can eventually lead to stress. Employees may begin to feel like its pointless to try and keep up with their daily tasks as the system alerts seem to multiply. This can contribute to frustration with their roles.
The Correct Tools Complement Skills
Harnessing machine learning can complement the strengths of a cybersecurity team, by significantly reducing the time they spend looking into recurring types of alerts. These are automated and bucketed, allowing the team to concentrate more on unique alerts, analysing patterns or threat hunting.
Setting up watchlists to ensure that alerts with certain features identified are promoted or suppressed, can also help to reduce alert fatigue. That way alerts from a group of users or devices that perform tasks that would usually trigger an alert are de-prioritised, which prevents benign events from becoming alerts and clogging up a security teams heavy workloads.
Don’t Miss: Army Fatigue Jacket Women’s
High Inaccuracy Of Alerts Leads To Desensitization
As the research report shows, a high percentage of alerts are false positives or of low priority. Regardless of these common inaccuracies, teams must still address each alert as if its a true positive until they know otherwise.
However, if the vast majority of alerts are either inaccurate or just noise, responders will start ignoring alerts, which can have potentially disastrous consequences.
How To Deal With Alert Fatigue
Managing alert fatigue has some general methods that can be applied to different fields, such as healthcare and cybersecurity. To combat alert fatigue in healthcare, workers should:
- Increase specificity of alerts by reducing inconsequential alerts
- Tier alerts. This can be set according to severity/alert priority. Alerts can be customized to notify workers in a particular way to help distinguish between alert types.
- Consolidate redundant alerts.
- Make alerts actionable. Alerts that are vague means more time and energy needs to go into figuring them out.
- Have balanced schedules. Ensure a hospital has enough on-call workers so too many alerts don’t fall on one person, as well as analyzing what times need more or less coverage and how frequently specific alerts happen.
- Continuously review alerting. After a while, go over alerting again to find out if any alerts are missed, if thresholds are too high or low and if employees are desensitized to any of the alerts.
In cybersecurity, methods used to fight alert fatigue can include:
Some of these tips can apply in multiple fields, such as making sure alerts are tiered, specific and consolidated.
Continue Reading About alert fatigue
You May Like: Is Fatigue A Symptom Of Prostate Cancer
Reduce Alert Fatigue For Your Security Team
You may have noticed some common themes throughout this article: false positives, actionable alerts, prioritization, and so on.
Many of the activities outlined above tie into one another and require collaboration across the security team. Although management might be responsible for signing off on priority levels and engineers are the ones configuring the alerts, the SOC analysts are the ones living in the SIEM from day to day and should work closely with the rest of the security organization to ensure the alerts they receive are actionable and providing value.
As with most aspects of cybersecurity, developing effective alerting to avoid alert fatigue requires diverse approaches. It also works best when the team members work cross-functionally to ensure any enabled alerts are required, the prioritization aligns with the severity of the alert, and the alerts generated have corresponding procedures.
As the capabilities to detect suspicious and malicious indicators and behaviors advance, security teams must further develop and mature their alerting processes to reduce the likelihood of alert fatigue. Although avoiding false positives wont always be possible, you can control the level of alerting thats enabled and appropriately tag the alerts that are generated to avoid an inundated SOC.
Slow Response To Notifications
If youre used to seeing many alerts turn out to be false positives, you become far less inclined to take immediate action. High volumes of low-fidelity alerts often occur due to oversensitive filtering rules and rarely do they indicate an emergency. So, you continue your current task and follow up on the alert when it feels more convenient.
Unfortunately, this behavior cant always discriminate between unnecessary alerts and those that require immediate attention. The result is an overall reduced sense of urgency when handling alerts, which means slower responses to those that need action.
Don’t Miss: Main Causes Of Extreme Fatigue
Misconceptions Fueling The Alert Fatigue Problem
Even though the survey respondents clearly indicate that their public cloud security alerts are lacking in accuracy, the vast majority say they feel confident in the accuracy of their security tools, and that they are satisfied with how their security tools prioritize risk.
Are we setting the bar too low for security?
Should we be demanding better risk prioritization to alleviate alert fatigue and become more effective in our security efforts?
To find out more and read about the key recommendations for addressing alert fatigue, download the Orca Security 2022 Cloud Security Alert Fatigue Report.
Discover How To Improve Alert Fatigue And Catch Security Threats
Historically strapped security teams are feeling more pressure than ever as ransomware crises, and massive security vulnerabilities continue to dominate the news. And while theres much emphasis on preventing threats on the outside from coming in, security leaders cant lose sight of whats happening inside and taking a toll on both security and information security teams: alert fatigue.
As the cybersecurity industry grapples with the ongoing talent shortage, security operations centers are already overwhelmed, and a constant stream of alerts doesnt necessarily make their jobs any easier. Too much noise and false positives can fatigue teams and desensitize them, resulting in important alerts being ignored or not responded to in time. The natural always-on stress of the job in the SOC, combined with an overload of unnecessary alerts, is a recipe for turnover, burnout and security risk.
Continuing down this path is not sustainable for infosec professionals or the organizations security postures that theyre meant to protect. For security teams to effectively detect and respond to threats without succumbing to fatigue, they need to be enabled with more reliable, high-fidelity alerts that lead to better response strategies.
You May Like: Fatigue Shortness Of Breath Headache
