Exabeam Alert Triage with Dynamic Alert Prioritization Now Available in Exabeam Fusion and Exabeam Security Investigation

Too many alerts, too little time. One of the most critical and time-consuming areas of a security operations analyst’s job is managing and triaging alerts. On average, organizations receive 11,000 alerts a day, but not all of those alerts represent a real security threat to the organization. Most alerts can be a result of untuned security tools, user error, or misconfiguration. According to the 2021 CRITICALSTART Research Report on Trends in the Cybersecurity Industry, more than 25% of alerts investigated are irrelevant. Yet, if you are a team or analyst tasked with reviewing all alerts that have been triggered in your organization, you must treat all alerts as though they are a threat to your organization — investigating and chasing down alerts with no security significance that distract from responding to true threats. 

Alert triage is the process of investigating security alerts to determine the potential threat they pose to an organization. Alerts deemed significant are escalated to incident response teams for further review, while alerts that appear insignificant are dismissed. Determining the alerts that matter can be difficult when you are overwhelmed by thousands of alerts with no context. How do you decide which alerts pose a threat to your organization and which are insignificant?

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Quickly and confidently prioritize and make decisions on security alerts

Exabeam Fusion and Exabeam Security Investigation both contain an efficient tool to support the alert triage process: Exabeam Alert Triage with Dynamic Alert Prioritization. Exabeam Alert Triage categorizes, aggregates, and enriches third-party and data lake security alerts, so analysts can more confidently and efficiently dismiss or escalate alerts from a single screen. Dynamic Alert Prioritization automates security alert prioritization from outside vendors — the first step in triaging.

The severity levels that security vendors apply to their alerts indicate the gravity of the detected vulnerability; however, alert severity levels are not standardized across security tools, so you cannot rely on them alone to indicate a threat. Instead, Exabeam uses behavioral analytics and context to understand the rarity and threat potential of a security alert — has this alert been seen before in the organization? Or for the user?

Understanding the context surrounding an alert allows Exabeam to automate prioritization and classify alerts by type. With this new feature, Exabeam categorizes alerts as high priority, low priority or observational to make the triage experience more precise. High-priority alerts pose the largest threat to your organization. Low-priority alerts are threats that have the potential to pose a threat, and observational alerts are those which Exabeam has classified as repetitive or observational only. You can filter your view to display alerts by priority.

Priority levels help you discover which alerts are most critical to your organization and need to be reviewed first, providing a starting point for the triage process. Classifying repetitive alerts as observational reduces the volume of alerts that need to be reviewed, filtering out noise from actionable signals. The Exabeam analytics engine does the manual and repetitive work, so you can focus on true threats.

A need for automation

There is a shortage of SOC talent, time, and budget, with cybersecurity professionals expecting their operational costs for personnel and technology to be tight in the future. Triaging the overwhelming number of alerts daily can’t be solved by hiring more people.

Instead, organizations need to expand the use of automation to support their teams’ workflows and automate manual processes. Exabeam Alert Triage automates prioritization of security alerts saving analysts’ time during the triage process. Identifying high-priority alerts quickly means that you can focus on alerts with high potential threat severity, while ignoring alerts with little security significance.

Exabeam Fusion and Exabeam Security Investigation customers can login to their Exabeam Security Operations Platform and see dynamic alert prioritization in action. If you are interested in seeing Alert Triage with Dynamic Alert Prioritization, along with other Exabeam capabilities, request a demo today!

Get the white paper, A SOC Manager’s Guide to New Efficiencies Automating the Full Threat Detection and Response Workflow.

With employees working remotely and accessing resources and services across public, private, and hybrid clouds through several devices and networks, the attack surface for malicious actors continues to grow.

SOC teams can harden their security posture by combining security and IT operations solutions to defend against these attacks. But balancing the deluge of alerts and staffing adequately can become a challenge as the SOC needs to also continually add to their stack as new threats emerge. This guide helps SOC managers determine where to leverage automation in their workflows to significantly reduce resourcing and budget constraints while ensuring the best security for their organization.