Alert Fatigue in Cybersecurity: What It Means and How to Solve It

What is alert fatigue?

Alert fatigue is the condition that arises when staff receive an overwhelming number of alerts – so many that they can’t effectively review or respond to each one.

To understand fully what this means, let’s step back a bit and talk about where alerts come from in the context of cybersecurity. Typically, a Security Operations Center (SOC) – the part of an organization responsible for monitoring for and responding to threats and risks – deploys software tools that generate alerts when they detect potential issues. For instance, a vulnerability scanner might alert the SOC to a newly discovered application security risk, and a network monitoring tool might create an alert if it detects unusual traffic that appears to be malicious.

The ability to generate alerts like these is critical for effective cybersecurity operations because alerts call employees’ attention to potential issues. Without alerts, staff would have to review monitoring data, scanning reports and similar resources manually to find problems – a task that would take far too long in most cases. Alerts help teams home in on the issues they need to address.

That said, if the volume or frequency of alerts becomes so great that the team becomes overwhelmed, alerts cease to serve a useful function. Instead, they become noise or distractions, leaving staff in the position of struggling to figure out which alerts they should actually pay attention to or prioritize. When this happens, the team experiences alert fatigue.

Alert fatigue in cybersecurity

Alert fatigue isn’t unique to cybersecurity; it can occur in any context where people rely on alerting tools – such as healthcare and general IT operations, both of which are fields where software can automatically generate alerts in response to problems or anomalies that may require attention from humans.

However, alert fatigue poses some special challenges in the context of cybersecurity, such as:

• High volumes of alerts: The frequency of reported vulnerabilities and cyber attacks has risen steadily in recent years, leading to ever-increasing volumes of alerts. This makes it challenging for security teams to avoid alert fatigue simply because they have more alerts than ever to contend with.
• Prioritization challenges: In cybersecurity, knowing which risks or threats to prioritize is critical. But when the SOC becomes overwhelmed with alerts, it becomes difficult to identify the most serious issues. As a result, staff may waste time responding to non-critical alerts while higher-priority ones go unnoticed.
• The need for real-time response: Unlike in some other fields, you can’t typically archive cybersecurity alerts and address them later. You need to respond immediately because the longer threats or vulnerabilities remain active, the higher the chances your organization will experience serious harm.
• Redundant tools and alerting systems: Often, SOCs use redundant alerting tools, which can lead to multiple alerts about the same issue. For example, if you have copies of the same application running on multiple servers, a vulnerability scanner that detects a vulnerability in the app may send a different alert for each application instance, even though they are linked to the same root cause.

In short, alert fatigue in cybersecurity is especially challenging to avoid, and it poses particularly acute risks to security operations.

What causes SOC alert fatigue?

Alert fatigue can result from multiple factors – and in many cases, it involves a combination of issues. Common causes of alert fatigue for SOCs include:

• False positives: False positive alerts happen when a tool generates an alert but no actual risk or threat is present. This increases the volume of alerts the team has to review without helping to identify relevant problems.
• Redundant alerts: When the same underlying issue results in multiple alerts, it increases the total volume of alerts and makes it harder for security analysts to focus on what matters.
• Incomplete alert data: When alerts don’t include all of the relevant contextual information, they can contribute to alert fatigue because it takes staff longer to analyze the alert and determine how to respond – and the longer it takes to assess each alert, the fewer alerts the team can handle in a given period of time.
• Inaccurate alert prioritization: Some alerts contain prioritization data designed to help staff determine how severe the issue is. This is helpful when the prioritization indications are accurate, but it creates more work – and therefore contributes to alert fatigue – in cases where the prioritization ratings are not accurate or reliable, forcing analysts to spend more time reviewing each alert.
• Lack of remediation guidance: Alerts that contain remediation guidance can help teams react more quickly. Although it’s not common for every alert to include remediation tips, failure to include this guidance within any alerts can cause alert fatigue because it requires staff to formulate response plans on their own, distracting them from handling the alert stream.
• Overstretched staff: In some cases, the chief cause of alert fatigue is not alerts or alerting systems themselves, but is instead an issue with SOC staffing. There may simply be too few analysts within the SOC to handle the volume of alerts adequately, or staff may be expected to perform additional tasks that undercut their ability to manage alerts efficiently.

How to avoid, detect, and mitigate alert fatigue

Because alert fatigue degrades the security team’s ability to respond to risk and threats effectively, organizations should have a process in place for preventing alert fatigue in the first place and responding to it quickly in the event it does occur.

Best practices for avoiding cybersecurity alert fatigue

The best ways to avoid alert fatigue include:

• Adequate staffing: Ensure that the SOC team is large enough to handle the volume of alerts without requiring excessive overtime or on-call scheduling on the part of security analysts.
• Alert customization: Tailoring alerting rules to your environment can help to reduce false positives, while also preventing or filtering out alerts that are not relevant based on your configuration or priorities.
• Add alert context: The more context that each alert includes, the faster team members can interpret and react to it. To that end, consider including information like prioritization and remediation guidance within alerts.
• AI-assisted alerting: AI features in alerting tools can streamline workflows through functionality like automated alert assessment or the summarization of alert information, which in turn helps teams review alerts more quickly and efficiently.

Detecting alert fatigue

In addition to taking steps to prevent alert fatigue, you’ll want to make sure you can detect it if it begins to set in. To this end, monitor metrics and KPIs such as:

• Total alert volume: This tells you how alert totals vary over time, allowing you to determine whether your overall alert rate is increasing or decreasing.
• Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) and Mean Time to Repair (MTTR): These KPIs reflect how quickly your team is able to respond to alerts. Lower MTTD and MTTR rates usually correlate with more efficient alert management. 
• False positive rate: High rates of false positives could be an indication that your team is at risk of alert fatigue because staff are burdened by alerts that aren’t relevant.
• Duplicate alerts: Along similar lines, a high incidence of duplicate alerts (meaning notifications about issues already covered by other alerts) can be an indicator of alert fatigue risks.

Preventing alert fatigue with Aqua

Aqua’s advanced incident detection and analysis capabilities help to minimize the risk of alert fatigue. By minimizing false positive risks, helping teams prioritize risks and generating automated remediation guidance, Aqua empowers cybersecurity staff to focus on what matters – and avoid becoming overwhelmed with irrelevant or low-priority alerts.

See for yourself by requesting a demo.