Cracking the Code: Tackling Alert Fatigue with Data-Led Insights

The rise in cyber alerts, threats, and breaches is causing significant challenges and higher costs for many companies and organisations, often turning into crises for business leaders. 

One major issue is alert fatigue, where security teams are overwhelmed by the sheer number of alerts, leading to inefficiency and fatigue. Alert fatigue in cybersecurity is a significant and growing problem, characterised by the overwhelming number of alerts that security teams must manage, leading to desensitisation and missed critical threats.  

Another challenge is investigating threats in isolation, and the lack of context in these alerts further hampers effective responses. Meeting compliance requirements and managing threats also add to the complexity of security tasks. 

A study commissioned by IBM found that security operation center (SOC) team members are “only getting half of the alerts that they’re supposed to review within a typical workday”

WHAT IS ALERT FATIGUE AND HOW TO TACKLE HEAD-ON 

With a deluge of security alerts, security teams have to manage a significant proportion of false positives, which leads many security teams to find themselves overwhelmed, receiving hundreds of public cloud security alerts daily. This high volume of alerts results in a substantial number being either not investigated or completely ignored, demonstrating the severe impact of alert fatigue on security operations. 

Excessive alerts can lead to “alert fatigue,” where security personnel may become desensitised to alerts and potentially miss critical notifications. NIST  

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STRONGER TOGETHER: COMBINING TECHNOLOGIES FOR AN INTERLINKED CYBER SECURITY STRATEGY 

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ALERT FATIGUE: THE SILENT SABOTEUR OF CYBERSECURITY 

Alert fatigue can lead to several serious consequences. A significant proportion of critical alerts are missed regularly. Overwhelmed teams may also be slow to react to actual threats, resulting in delayed responses to mitigate risks. This inefficiency can lead to increased costs associated with data breaches.

Additionally, alert fatigue leads to high turnover and burnout among cybersecurity professionals, resulting in internal friction and negatively impacting team morale. The existing skill shortage makes hiring qualified professionals challenging, making it crucial for businesses to retain their staff, as replacements are difficult to find. 

TOO MANY TOOLS, TOO MANY PROBLEMS: THE PITFALLS OF SECURITY TOOL OVERLOAD 

Using too many security tools can backfire. Organisations with multiple tools will find it harder to detect and respond to attacks. This tool overload creates redundant alerts, adding to the problem. Integrating and managing these tools is also complex and time-consuming, leading to more inefficiencies and increased alert fatigue. 

58% of mid-sized organisations reported not benefiting from tooling that can be tailored to their specific business needs. This implies that many are using generic tools that may not fully address their unique security requirements. Security Intelligence 

ALERT AVALANCHE: UK’S CYBER SLEUTHS DROWNING IN A SEA OF CONTEXTLESS CLUES 

Investigating cyber threats individually and dealing with alerts lacking context are another major issue for businesses. These challenges hinder effective responses to potential security incidents.  

Many businesses receive a flood of security alerts, with a significant proportion dealing with more than 500 public cloud alerts daily. These alerts often lack necessary details, making it hard for security teams to prioritise and respond effectively. 2022 Cloud Security Orca Alert Fatigue Report 

A considerable number of alerts—up to 30%—are either ignored or not thoroughly investigated due to their isolated nature and lack of context. 

Training and certification rates in cybersecurity standards like Cyber Essentials are also low, suggesting a need for improved preparedness and response strategies. 

To address these challenges, a comprehensive approach is necessary, including better alert management, enhanced contextual understanding, and improved incident response planning and training. 

COMBATTING ALERT FATIGUE: LEVERAGING AUTOMATION AND INTEGRATED SOLUTIONS IN CYBERSECURITY 

Businesses can effectively combat alert fatigue by leveraging automation, data insights, and integrated cybersecurity solutions.  

Automation plays a crucial role in speeding up incident response and reducing the burden on security teams by automating alert triage and response actions.  

Data-driven insights enable organisations to prioritise and focus on critical threats, enhancing the efficiency of security operations. By accelerating alert fidelity and generating better quality alerts, these insights help reduce noise and ensure that attention is directed toward the most significant issues. 

Integrated solutions that consolidate security tools and workflows streamline processes, ensuring a cohesive approach to threat detection and response.  

By adopting these strategies, businesses can significantly improve their cybersecurity posture, mitigate risks, and maintain resilience against evolving threats in today’s digital landscape. 

Automation and AI can handle low-priority alerts, freeing up human analysts to focus on critical threats. Some organisations are opting for all-in-one solutions to simplify and reduce alert volumes. Alert fatigue remains a major cybersecurity challenge, affecting team effectiveness and increasing the risk of missed threats. Solving this requires better tool integration, automation, and smart alert prioritisation. 

STRONGER TOGETHER: COMBINING TECHNOLOGIES FOR AN INTERLINKED CYBER SECURITY STRATEGY 

Join Trustco PLC for an exclusive webinar on WED, JUL 24, 2024, 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM where we reveal integrated strategies to protect your data and endpoints against sophisticated threats. Hear from solution experts at Tenable, Sophos, and Sumo Logic, and discover how their latest technologies can fortify your enterprise against vulnerabilities and ensure data security across all environments. 

Join the conversation to learn from experts and participate in live Q&A sessions. 

REGISTER FOR THE WEBINAR TODAY 

UNLOCKING SECURITY INSIGHTS WITH SUMO LOGIC: YOUR CLOUD-NATIVE PARTNER IN ACTION 

With Sumo Logic’s AI-powered SaaS Log Analytics Platform, organizations can unify and analyse enterprise data, translating it into actionable insights. This single source of truth enables Dev, Sec, and Ops teams to simplify complexity, collaborate efficiently, and accelerate data-driven decisions that drive business value. Customers around the world rely on Sumo Logic to ingest and analyse logs, events, metrics, traces, and other data sources at scale to ensure application reliability, secure and protect against modern security threats, and gain insights into their cloud infrastructures. 

Speak to Trustco Plc to find out how Sumo Logic’s platform & flex licensing model can help you with the huge increase in data ingest. Don’t let your visibility suffer by being restricted by budget! 

Cloud SIEM: Enhance your security posture with real-time threat detection, investigation and response. 

Logs for Security: Seamlessly manage and secure your cloud attack surface – 

Your changing attack surface needs increased threat visibility and deep security context from use-case-driven queries, dashboards, and alerts. 

Audit and Compliance: Simplify compliance reporting and maintain audit readiness effortlessly. 

Troubleshooting and Monitoring: Go from troubleshooting to fixing – fast 

Collect structured and unstructured log data across cloud services and on-premises
to analyze and troubleshoot issues before they impact
the health of your applications and systems. 

Sumo Logic can plug into any environment, on-prem, cloud, etc. Their strongest benefit is the ease with which they can extract logs from your environment helping to improve visibility and reduce the impact of cyberattacks and downtime. They are the perfect platform to enable a DevSecOps strategy internally.