By Euan Carswell, SOC Team Lead at Barrier Networks
Everyone can relate to the 7AM alarm call.
You can be in a deep sleep when suddenly your ears are met with an incessant pinging that won’t stop until you muster the energy to hit snooze.
This is a morning ritual for many. The alarm clock alerts it’s morning, and there is always a sense of relief when you turn off the monotonous ring, knowing it’s over for another day.
But imagine working in an environment where the alarm clock goes off relentlessly all day long. The pinging comes from everywhere, never stopping, and there is no such thing as a snooze button.
This might sound like a nightmare scenario but it’s actually akin to working in a modern-day cyber security team. Instead of the alarm acting as a wake-up call, it’s alerting teams to potential security threats which could indicate their organisation is under attack.
But in this environment, no alerts can be snoozed. Instead, they come flooding in near-constantly, from multiple sources, and each ping must be logged and investigated, before security teams can move on and put the case to bed.
But with so much data flooding in, this can create an information overload, which often overwhelms security teams and results in them missing key alerts and heightening risk, causing what has become widely known as Alert Fatigue.
Understanding Alert Fatigue
Alert fatigue is a common and well-known problem among security professionals. It arises when teams are flooded with security alerts from monitoring solutions, which can leave them feeling overwhelmed and overstretched. This can then impact their attentiveness and can result in them missing important security warnings.
Today, the average security team encounters hundreds of alerts every single day. These alerts can come from monitoring tools or other security products, and each ping alerts the security team to a potential risk that must be investigated.
But given the volume and frequency at which the alerts come, this makes managing and investigating each alert a major challenge for most organisations, especially when security is managed internally.
Firstly, there is a major problem with alert prioritisation and knowing which alert to investigate first.
While secondly, for most SMEs, security teams will often be small and under resourced, so managing and investigating every alert can add a major strain on them. These skeleton teams will often have to manage all security projects for their organisation, so triaging alerts will only be one part of their job. The alerts will come from multiple sources, and many of them will be false positives, or emitted from security tools that are misconfigured, but they still need to be investigated thoroughly. Otherwise, an overlooked alert could amount to a full-scale attack, and it is the analyst who missed the warning that will often bear the responsibility of this, adding both mental and physical stress on them.
So, how can internal security teams alleviate the pressure alerts place on them, without compromising security?
Outsourcing to dedicated Managed Security Service Providers
One of the best ways for internal security teams to overcome this challenge is by outsourcing to dedicated Managed Security Service Providers (MSSPs).
MSSPs can provide dedicated support to manage alerts for organisations, alleviating the burden from internal teams while also providing additional security expertise.
These service providers can work from modern Security Operations Centres (SOCs) and have teams dedicated to investigating alerts as soon as they come in. They can also help configure tools to minimise them producing unnecessary alerts, plus they can use their knowledge of the threat landscape to more quickly identify false positives.
Furthermore, because they are dedicated to working on the cyber frontlines, they can also use their knowledge to understand the alerts which must be prioritised and could indicate malicious activity. They can also provide a 24/7 service, which means all alerts are investigated quickly, ensuring no alerts occurring out of standard business hours are missed and subsequently result in a breach.
Alert fatigue is a common problem encountered by security professionals today and it can seriously harm the well-being of analysts and heighten organisational risks.
The best way for organisations to combat this serious issue is by working with MSSPs, who have analysts dedicated to understanding, investigating and remediating alerts. These analysts have proven experience and expertise at identifying and triaging alerts, allowing them to prioritise them and act quickly to remediate malicious activity.
This frees up internal security teams and reduces the risks posed by alert fatigue, while significantly improving cyber resilience.
