Definition
Alert fatigue occurs when a high volume of alerts overwhelms cybersecurity, making them incapable of handling real security threats.
Sometimes cybersecurity system creates many notifications to alert the security teams about potential dangers like suspicious network activity, malware infections or unauthorized access attempts. Too many notifications can lead to exhaustion, and the security team may struggle to investigate each alert.
A restless barrage of alerts can desensitize security teams, causing them to disregard the critical ones. Also, it becomes challenging to differentiate between actual threats and false positives or low-risk incidents.
Alert Fatigue Causes
- Excessive false positives: If a security system flags a high number of false-positive alerts, the security team may be overwhelmed and frustrated by the notifications.
- Low-priority alerts: Some security warnings have low levels of severity. As such, concentrating on them may divert attention and resources from more catastrophic threats.
- Lack of resources: Security experts can become overwhelmed if they are a few and expected to handle excessive alerts.
- Limited customization: Poor customization of cybersecurity alerts can lead to irrelevant or non-threatening alerts, causing fatigue.
- Poorly defined management processes: Poorly defined incident response procedures and processes can be problematic and even cause fatigue.
Risks of Alert Fatigue
- Failed or delayed response: Excessive security alerts deter or slow down speedy response to security threats. As a result, hackers get adequate time to exploit weaknesses and launch their attacks.
- Increased dwell time: Dwell time is the period an intruder stays undetected by the system. Alert fatigue increases this duration, allowing the attackers to do more harm.
- Decreased situational awareness: Tiredness can lower situational awareness, making the security team struggle to make accurate decisions.
- Increased costs: If a cybersecurity system fails to prioritize genuine threats, it may allocate more resources to manage the overwhelming alerts. This increases the cost for the organization.
- Reputation damage: A security breach can damage an organizational reputation, causing customer and revenue loss.
How to Avoid Alert Fatigue
- Set smart thresholds: Establishing an intelligent threshold for alerts helps determine whether an alert demands an immediate response or can wait until later. The key to smart thresholds is balancing the risk of missed threats against alert fatigue.
- Set actionable alerts: Vague alerts tend to consume more time and resources than actionable alerts, which are more specific and direct. An already overwhelmed security team could become less productive when dealing with vague alerts.
- Consolidate alerts: Consolidating redundant alerts will help reduce the number of low-priority alerts and improve the effectiveness and time taken to deal with alerts. Such notifications are a major cause of alert fatigue.
- Optimize schedules: Organizations may experience excessive alerts, even with tired systems and intelligent thresholds. So, it is important to balance on-call schedules and distribute workload evenly.
- Centralize information: Consolidating alerts and information can reduce the fatigue of sorting those notifications and accompanying information.
- Prioritize continuous improvement: There isn’t a one-time or one-fix to alert fatigue and its risks. So, it is important to review processes, systems and alerts regularly.