Reducing Alert Fatigue with XSPM’s Smart Prioritization Features

Concerned about their cybersecurity, organisations around the world are using various security tools, techniques, and processes to protect their business.

But using too many security tools, although advanced, is again an issue as they generate a high volume of alerts or notifications, where most of them are false positives.

Due to frequent attacks, false positives, legacy systems, complex IT infrastructures, lack of resources to manage alerts, and so on, cybersecurity alert fatigue increases. This affects your organisation’s security and compliance and employees’ physical and mental well-being.

In this article, let’s discuss all about alert fatigue and how to reduce it.

Alert fatigue is the frustration, mental exhaustion, or desensitisation that cybersecurity professionals feel when they receive an overwhelming number of notifications or alerts from monitoring systems, threat management tools, and other security systems. Because of this condition, these professionals could miss or ignore security alerts or delay responding to them.

As a result, dealing with security threats on time would become challenging for security teams. Constant alerts could cause employee burnout and take a toll on their productivity. Alert fatigue could also result in more incidents and negatively impact your reputation, customer trust, finances, and business operations.

According to a report by IDC, companies with:

• 500-1499 employees ignore 27% of all alerts they receive
• 1500-4,999 employees ignore 30% of alerts
• 5000+ employees ignore 23% of alerts
  

The report also mentioned that the capability to correlate to, ingest, or respond to threats is difficult for most organisations.

Suppose you receive too many prank calls from a number. What would you do? Most people block the number while some may turn off their phones altogether. Similarly, if you receive an unending stream of important or redundant alarms, you tend to ignore them.

This is what happens when you receive too many alerts repeatedly, leading to alert fatigue. It’s practical. If you get a couple of alerts, you can inspect them thoroughly and respond to them effectively. However, if you receive a series of alerts consecutively, you will have very little time to inspect and respond to each. It’s also possible that you may tend to miss important details. That’s why many ignore them.

Let’s talk about the reasons behind alert fatigue to understand this more closely.

False Positives
False positives are alerts that security systems continuously use for non-threatening incidents. This could happen if the systems are configured so poorly that they flag even unnecessary events. In this case, organisations set very low thresholds for alerts, probably to be on the safe side.
The downside of this is it triggers a stream of alerts for all incidents, even those unnecessary (false positives). This alert overload overwhelms your security team, making it difficult to filter and respond to real threats that need immediate attention.

No Context
Alerts without proper context add confusion and make it challenging for security professionals to understand how critical an alert is. This delays response as you will have to inspect each alert separately, where some can be highly critical while others could be bogus.

Lack of Prioritisation
To respond to real threats, you must be able to detect and prioritise the alerts corresponding to them. But if you can’t differentiate threatening events from non-threatening events, you may have to assume they are all urgent. In the process, you may not be able to address critical threats in time. This is why prioritising threats is important, so you can identify critical threats and prioritise responses.

However, many security systems don’t prioritise alerts effectively as they work independently from other tools with no access to data from those tools. So, you need to address each threat manually without knowing their criticality. This delays response times and increases alert fatigue.

Advanced Cyberattacks
Cyberattacks are not only growing in number, they are also becoming more sophisticated. Attackers are using evolving technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), cloud computing, etc. to create more dangerous attacks. In response, organisations use a variety of security systems to protect their complex IT infrastructure. So, the number of alerts is increasing and managing all of them is stressful for your security teams.

Complex Infrastructure
You may have multiple cybersecurity systems in your toolkit, including legacy systems with traditional technology to effectively filter and prioritise alerts. It's also a huge task to manage the configurations of each system and modify them for emerging threats. And if you don’t pivot, these systems may malfunction at some point and send false and duplicate alerts, resulting in alert fatigue.

Poor Alert Management
If your security team doesn’t have a proper way of managing security alerts or process alerts with a well-defined incident response plan, it could amplify alert fatigue. In the absence of proper planning, policies, and procedures and efficient cybersecurity alert management tools, your team will lack direction and responding to alerts will become tougher. 

Smaller Team
Not every organisation has a big security team and plenty of resources to handle each alert effectively, especially small and medium-sized businesses. With limited resources and team members, a large number of consecutive threats overwhelms them. This affects their productivity and response times, ultimately leading to alert fatigue.

Alert fatigue in your security team involves a number of risks and impacts:

Delayed Response
Constant alerts overwhelm security professionals and impact their ability to handle them effectively. They may slow down in inspecting and addressing each alert. So, a critical threat can translate into a security disaster if not treated in time. It could also leave your customers unsatisfied.

Missed Threats
When your security staff are desensitised due to alert fatigue, they may miss or ignore critical threats, although unintentionally. They may miss out on important details, context, and even minor security breaches. This will give rise to more security incidents to devastate your organisation.

Employee Burnout
When security professionals are constantly exposed to alerts, it takes a toll on their mental, physical, and emotional health. First, it affects their productivity; they may not perform excellently in managing threats. Being under stress, the chance of making mistakes increases. This means the chances of smaller cybersecurity incidents turning into big-time attacks increase.

On a deeper level, alert fatigue may result in severe anxiety. They may feel neglected or of lower self-esteem. This could amount to dissatisfaction in their job, which means more chances of leaving their organisation. So, you will have to again invest in hiring and training new security professionals to fill the role.

Legal and Compliance Issues
Not being able to address and manage cyber threats in time increases the risks of data breaches. This could expose your customer and business data to external entities who may misuse it. As a consequence, your organisation may have to face legal and data compliance issues. This may cost you heavy penalties and damage your reputation.

There are traditional methods available to manage security alerts, such as basic automation and manual triage using scanners, testing tools, and other systems. But, they are not that effective.

Even with automation, they lack the deeper context to be able to score threats efficiently and correctly. They also don’t help you get to the root cause of alert fatigue and are error-prone and time-consuming. In addition, these methods largely depend on the inputs you provide, involving many false positives and the chance of reoccurrence.

So what’s the solution?
How do you manage alerts effectively?
Here are some of the ways to go about it:

Prioritise alerts based on severity to identify and address critical threats first. Let’s understand how to tackle alert fatigue using Microminder’s Extended Security Posture Management (XSPM) which comes with a smart prioritisation feature.

Extended Security Posture Management (XSPM) is a preventive cybersecurity strategy that integrates various security strategies, tools, and techniques for improving the cybersecurity posture management of an organisation. This includes capabilities, including but not limited to:

• Red teaming to improve your preparedness against attacks by simulating real-world incidents
• Purple teaming test your security measures in place by including offensive and defensive approaches
• Attack surface management (ASM) to evaluate and secure your attack surface
• Breach and attack simulation (BAS) to identify and neutralise attacks in your systems and network
• Continuous security monitoring to detect potential threats by gaining a 360-degree view of your systems
  
  

An XSPM system consolidates data from the above components, so you can understand your security posture more closely. It also prioritises alerts, so you can respond to them first. This helps you manage your data, prioritise tasks, implement security measures, and control other security-related processes.

XSPM’s Smart Prioritisation
Smart prioritisation is one of the key features of XSPM, which prioritises security alerts based on severity. This helps you identify the risks that are more critical in nature and respond to them faster. As a result, you won’t have to assume all alerts are equal or investigate and respond to each one of them. Here’s how smart prioritisation helps:

Enriches alerts with contextual data to understand their criticality
Ranks alert based on the risk and impact each alert poses
Uses AI and ML to predict real threats and identify patterns

Here’s how XSPM benefits your business:

Better Security
XSPM with smart prioritisation helps you detect and neutralise security risks efficiently using various tools and mechanisms. It also keeps your organisation attack-ready with real-world simulations through red teaming and purple teaming. You can also continuously monitor your systems for risks and fix them as soon as they occur. Thus, you get wholesome protection against cyberattacks, which improves your overall security posture.

Compliance
Due to increasing cyberattacks and data breaches, regulatory bodies have made more stringent guidelines for organisations to follow. Using XSPM in your organisation to secure your business and customer data helps you comply with legal and regulatory bodies, such as PCI DSS, HIPAA, UK GDPR, etc. This avoids penalties and possible reputational damage.

Preparedness Against Attacks
You must always be prepared to fight with cyberattacks, which are becoming more sophisticated and frequent. With XSPM, you can prepare your team with exercises, such as red teaming and purple teaming that include simulations based on real-world security incidents.

Prompt Response
Relying on just one tool limits your security capabilities. But when you use XSPM, you get access to a number of tools and processes that help you respond proactively to threats. This improves your overall detection, remediation, and management capabilities. Your team won’t also be overburdened with alert fatigue or miss any important security detail.

Happier Employees
When you empower your employees with useful tools and resources, it helps them get better at their jobs without getting burned out. Multiple systems could work in unison, correlating data from one other and reducing false positives and alert fatigue. As a result, job satisfaction among employees increases and the chances are your employees won’t have to bid goodbye to your organisation.

Customise thresholds: Set your alert threshold based on your organisation’s risk tolerance and attack surface. Revisit thresholds periodically and adjust them based on current needs for alert suppression.

Response automation: Automating responses to alerts like resetting passwords, service restarts, etc. saves time and helps reduce fatigue.

Alert grouping: Grouping related alerts automatically also saves time in handling alerts individually.

Incident response: Create a well-defined, proactive incident management plan for your security team to follow while responding to threats. It will have all the step-by-step processes, tools in use and techniques to manage alerts and respond to them.

Advanced systems: Use advanced alert systems powered by AI and ML to reduce false positives. These systems correlate data from other systems to make accurate predictions on alerts, so you can prioritise remediation.

Training: Invest in training your employees on how to use alert systems, which alerts to prioritise first, and address risks effectively to manage alert fatigue.

Alert fatigue is a growing issue for modern organisations that leads to delayed response, missed alerts, security and compliance risks, and employee turnover.

Microminder’s extended security posture management (XSPM) with smart prioritisation is an excellent solution to alert fatigue and cybersecurity posture improvement. It will help you protect your organisation from cyberattacks by identifying and prioritising critical alerts and addressing them proactively. Our XSPM capabilities:

• Continuous automated red teaming (CART) with real-world simulations and advanced threat hunting to prepare you for attacks
• Purple teaming to evaluate your security mechanisms and improve them with realistic-looking scenarios
• Breach and attack simulation (BAS) to identify the attackers’ tools and techniques and how effective your measures are against those
• Attack surface management (ASM) validates the security posture of each system, network, and endpoint and finds and contains compromised ones
  
  

Improve your cybersecurity with Microminder’s extended security posture management (XSPM) services. Talk to our experts to explore our XSPM.