Matthew Edwards
Digital Forensics and Incident Response (DFIR) are more critical than ever in an era where cyber threats and attacks are constantly evolving. Breaches are happening daily, each one costing, on average, $4.35m, or in the US, $9.44m.
DFIR investigators and analysts are directly responsible for identifying, containing, and mitigating these attacks, as well as conducting an in-depth analysis of compromised endpoint systems.
However, a major challenge faced by most DFIR professionals is alert fatigue, which can undermine their efficiency and effectiveness. When some larger organizations are experiencing over 1,100 attacks per week, it’s a conveyor belt of new cases and alerts to process.
In this blog post, we’ll discuss the associated risks of alert fatigue amongst DFIR professionals and explore how Binalyze AIR, thanks to its innovative features, can help directly tackle and reduce this problem.
Understanding Alert Fatigue in DFIR
Alert fatigue refers to the very real situation of mental exhaustion experienced by DFIR professionals as they sift through countless security alerts, many of which may be false positives or irrelevant. This phenomenon of fatigue can lead to several pretty significant risks within organizations, including:
Overlooking Critical Threats: With an overwhelming volume of alerts, investigators may inadvertently miss crucial threats or indicators of compromise, putting organizations at risk of further cyber attacks. This can lengthen the investigation window and further increase the ongoing risk posed by a breach.
Decreased Morale and Burnout: The constant barrage of alerts can wear the most battle-hardened investigator down; even the most experienced investigator can struggle, leading to low morale, increased stress, and, ultimately, career burnout.
Inefficient Use of Resources: Continually investigating false positives and irrelevant alerts consumes valuable time and resources that could otherwise be used for addressing the actual root causes of threats. In DFIR, time is super critical, and there’s never a second to waste.
Tackling alert fatigue Binalyze AIR
By leveraging cutting-edge technologies, Binalyze AIR streamlines the incident response process and enables investigators to focus on what truly matters: mitigating breaches and threats. Binalyze AIR has been designed from the ground up to be the number one solution to reduce alert fatigue.
Advanced case reporting: Binalyze AIR is lightning-fast and easy to use. In just a few minutes, AIR collects a full forensic picture of the assets requiring investigation, produces a fully processed forensic case report, and by using our proprietary DRONE module, performs an assisted compromise assessment to support the analyst’s decision-making process and get them to relevant threats in minutes.
False Positive Reduction: The ability to automatically collect full forensic visibility in minutes in response to an alert significantly simplifies the process of false positive identification. Maintaining regular and automated forensic baseline snapshots, which can then be compared in seconds using differential analysis, further enhances your ability to easily filter out irrelevant alerts, thereby saving time and resources for investigators.
Integrated Case Management: Binalyze AIR includes an integrated case management system, which allows investigators to track and manage multiple incidents effectively. This helps in maintaining focus, reducing stress, and preventing burnout. This also supports cross-team collaboration and reduces siloed investigation practices and bottlenecks.
Automated Processes: With built-in automation, Binalyze AIR can perform routine tasks, such as evidence collection and analysis, freeing up investigators to focus on more complex, high-value issues. All this work can be further automated by triggering AIR directly from your SIEM, SOAR, or EDR solution.
Customizable Workflows: Binalyze AIR enables organizations just like yours to tailor workflows according to your specific needs and requirements, from uploading your own Yara, Sigma, or OSQuery rules to integrations via Webhooks with existing security solutions. This flexibility ensures a more efficient and streamlined incident response process - building on the systems and processes you may already have in place.
Alert fatigue poses a significant challenge to DFIR investigators, undermining their ability to identify and mitigate cyber threats effectively. With limited team resources and increasing attacks - it’s no longer possible to scale your SOC operations to meet the challenge head-on.
However, there is now a solution that tackles alert fatigue at its foundation and is revolutionizing DFIR workflows.
Simply DFIRent
Binalyze AIR is the leading solution for modern DFIR, offering an advanced solution to combat alert fatigue. Thanks to AIR, you can empower your DFIR investigators and SOC analysts to work more efficiently, maintain focus on critical threats, and ultimately protect your digital assets against breaches. Thanks to the power of AIR, you can:
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Find: uncover undetected breaches with automated comparisons of scheduled snapshots of all endpoints to see and assess what’s changed.
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Scale: enable a team of 3 to deliver what currently takes a team of 10 to achieve by automating forensic processes and driving false-positive elimination of EDR/XDR alerts
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Contain: complete end-to-end investigations, including containment & remediation, typically in under 4 hours.
To find out more about AIR - how it can improve the efficiency of your DFIR efforts and reduce alert fatigue - why not sign up for a free 14-day trial?
