While so-called “alert fatigue” (where an individual receives so many alerts that they no longer make sense to them) is known to be a problem for many cybersecurity teams, the issue has detrimental effects on everything from the security of cloud environments to staff retention, according to new research.
See also: Cloud gaming: Stadia brings 100 new titles in 2022
Orca Security, a cloud security startup that commissioned the new study, says it’s the first to specifically focus on the problem of public cloud security alert fatigue. The term refers to the fact that many security teams are overloaded with alerts generated by their security tools that teams must respond to.
Among the findings of the 2022 Cloud Security Alert Fatigue Report is that 59% of respondents report receiving more than 500 public cloud security alerts per day. 38% report receiving more than 1,000 of these alerts each day.
See also: Cloudflare acquires Area 1 Security for $162 million
And many of the alerts don’t actually represent a cyber threat. A significant percentage of respondents – 43% – said that more than 40% of public cloud security alerts are false positives. Four in five respondents said that more than 20% of their alerts are false positives.
Overall, the result is that real cyberattacks are getting lost in the chaos, according to Orca Security.
“When security teams receive hundreds of low-priority alerts that contain a high percentage of false positives, they start to ignore the alerts,” Avi Shua, co-founder and CEO of Orca Security, said in an email to VentureBeat. “This leads to alerts that truly deserve attention being missed, negatively impacting the company’s cloud security posture and opening the door to potential attacks and breaches.”
Many security tools are unable to separate serious from low-priority issues and generally overreport issues, Shua said. That's because they lack the information needed to effectively prioritize risks, he said.
See also: Cloud security is too important to leave to cloud providers
Also, 55% of respondents said their teams are not receiving critical alerts – risks that could put the organization’s critical assets, including personally identifiable information, at risk.
Information source: venturebeat.com
