Alert fatigue kills data breach detection efforts
Is there anything more frightening than missing a cyber attack? For most organizations, the answer is no. However, for many security teams, it’s challenging to tune alerts properly to minimize false positives and still be alerted to potential attacks. Too many security tools, lack of integration between tooling, and vague alerts are a recipe for disaster for SOCs. Analysts are expected to triage hundreds of alerts daily, taking away time from threat hunting, threat intelligence research, and other day-to-day responsibilities. There’s a reason that alert fatigue is one of the most common issues SOCs face: it’s nearly impossible to investigate every potential attack when analysts are bombarded with more alerts than they can handle on a daily basis. This constant barrage leads to lower priority alerts being overlooked or outright ignored, increasing the risk that an organization has missed an attack.
How can security teams minimize false positives, decrease alert fatigue, and increase efficiency while ensuring that analysts are alerted to things that really matter? Here’s a solution that checks all the boxes: Attack Analytics. In this post, we’ll explain what Attack Analytics is and why it’s worth looking into.
What is Attack Analytics?
In the spirit of Cybersecurity Awareness Month, Imperva makes awareness around potential threats easy with Attack Analytics. Imperva Attack Analytics correlates and distills thousands of security events into a few distinct readable narratives. These narratives are actionable, decreasing time to resolution. Artificial intelligence and machine learning process incoming events to find correlations between them. Events are sorted and grouped into easy-to-understand incidents that are prioritized accordingly, taking the mystery out of investigations. Security teams can respond to threats quickly and decisively; they immediately understand an attack and know which incidents require immediate attention. Instead of combing through thousands of events, Attack Analytics presents teams with a handful of incidents, minimizing alert fatigue. Attack Analytics is a cloud-based tool with unlimited scaling potential and is included as part of your Imperva solution at no additional cost.
Image 1: From almost 28,000 events, only 71 incidents were created.
Identifying security incidents made easy
Vague alerts often provide enough information to start an investigation but lack the necessary detail to promptly and confidently respond. Attack Analytics presents information in an understandable way, minimizing the time an analyst spends determining the scope and severity of an attack.
Security events are displayed in easy-to-understand dashboards that highlight the top attack origins, attack tool types, attacked resources, attack timeline, and policy violations. You can easily drill down into these dashboards for more information on specific attack details.
Image 2: some of the OOTB dashboards included with Attack Analytics.
Attack Analytics then groups security events together into incidents based on the commonalities between them. Each incident is displayed as a simple narrative: analysts are presented with the type of attack, attack origin, attacker IP reputation, timeframe, tools that were utilized, and any related CVEs. Analysts have the option to add notes to incidents or mark them as acknowledged, preventing duplication of efforts across teams.
Image 3: Part of an Attack Analytics incident. Incidents are easy-to-understand and display all the information an analyst needs to investigate.
The all-seeing eye for your Imperva environment
As more companies migrate to the cloud, it’s increasingly difficult to monitor security events enterprise-wide. Disparate security tooling leaves companies struggling to understand the bigger picture during an attack. Attack Analytics provides organizations with a unified view to monitor all security events gathered by Imperva tools. You get complete visibility across all data repositories, making it simple to identify enterprise-wide attack campaigns.
Visibility and integration support with other Imperva solutions include API Security, Account Takeover, DDoS, Cloud WAF, Reputation Intelligence, and WAF Gateway. Instead of each tool creating separate incidents, Attack Analytics analyzes events from each of these tools to find commonalities between them, minimizing the number of incidents while providing more detail for each attack. Attack Analytics can see the attack in greater depth, which creates incidents that are detailed, insightful, and actionable.
Image 4: API Security, DDoS, WAF Gateway, Cloud WAF, and Account Takeover are all integrated with Attack Analytics.
Recommendations on best security posture
Attack Analytics also analyzes your current security infrastructure and makes recommendations for a stronger security posture. Attack Analytics reviews your current policy actions and configurations to drive these recommendations. Some insights include recommending changing policies from alert to block, alerting customers to exposed original servers, and highlighting unprotected APIs.
Image 5: Attack Analytics recommends changing a WAF policy from alert to block based on a recent attack.
Insights from around the world
Attack Analytics analyzes customer data from around the world to identify emerging attack patterns to help organizations stay up to date on the latest threats. Rather than having analysts hunt through logs to determine if an organization has been hit with a new attack, this collective intelligence highlights the new attack trends in an environment. When triaging an incident, organizations can see how common this attack is among all Imperva customers. Attack Analytics informs Security teams of what threats they’re currently facing, so they can quickly respond, and maintain a proactive approach.
Image 6: When looking at an incident, customers are able to see if an attack is common across the Imperva customer base.
Your partner in the fight against bad actors
Attack Analytics is a game-changer for security teams. By doing the heavy lifting and analyzing information from different security tools, Attack Analytics increases efficiency and optimizes SOCs. Distilling thousands of events into appropriately prioritized incidents allows analysts to pivot away from creating SIEM correlation rules and focus on what really matters: the threats at hand. It is an easy-to-adopt solution that provides meaningful narratives across each Imperva tool. Learn more.
Try Imperva for Free
Protect your business for 30 days on Imperva.
