Study: Alert Overload Plagues Cybersecurity Professionals

CriticalStart, a Plano, Texas-based provider of Managed Detection and Response (MDR) services, has released its third-annual Security Operations Center (SOC) survey, revealing that alert-overload still plagues the cybersecurity industry. Forty-seven percent of respondents reported personally investigating 10 to 20 alerts each day, a 12-percent increase from 2019. Moreover, 25-percent of respondents said they investigate 21 to 40 alerts each day, up from 14-percent the year prior.

“Just like businesses and organizations from both the public and private sector are consistently under attack from malicious actors, security professionals are consistently being bombarded with alerts to investigate,” said Jordan Mauriello, Senior VP of Managed Services at CriticalStart. “This is a problem that isn’t going away, so it is imperative that enterprises invest in the people, process, and technology that are needed to combat this alert overload.”

The report, entitled “Alert Overload Still Plagues Cybersecurity Industry,” surveyed 100 SOC professionals across enterprises, Managed Security Services Providers (MSSP) and Managed Detection & Response (MDR) providers to evaluate the state of incident response within SOCs from a variety of perspectives, including alert volume and management, business models, customer communications, and SOC analyst training and turnover.

Nearly 70-percent of respondents said that 25 to 75-percent of the alerts they investigate on a daily basis are false positives. Almost half of all respondents said they turn off high volume alerting features when there are too many alerts for analysts to process, creating the potential for a legitimate and serious alert to be missed. In addition, 66-percent of survey takers reported seeing an increase in alerts since the known spread of COVID-19 began in mid-March of 2020, and 89-percent said they had been forced to work remotely as a result of COVID-19.

Channel Impact^®
The data underscore the ongoing challenges associated with managing an effective security operations center, pointing the way towards additional opportunities for channel partners.