It’s probably no surprise that employees are inundated with notifications and emails every day, but new research has shown that this is actually having a detrimental effect on daily cybersecurity activities.
A Vectra AI survey found that 71% of security professionals worry they will miss a real attack hidden in a stream of insignificant alerts, as vendors scramble to cover all bases in an ever-evolving threat landscape.
In some cases, threat detection tools cause more problems than they solve, as 47% don’t trust their tools to work the way they need them to, and the majority (54%) say their workload has actually increased.
The signal and the sound
A whopping 81% of security professionals spend more than two hours a day searching and assessing security events, and report that only 16% of the alerts they receive are “real attacks.”
However, things are improving, with teams feeling more confident in their defense than a year ago. The introduction of AI helps; 73% say their workload and burnout have been reduced thanks to AI. As AI plays a larger role in cyber attacks, many security professionals are using it as part of their response.
“Teams believe AI provides an attack signal that will help them identify and prioritize threats, speed response times and reduce alert fatigue, but trust needs to be rebuilt. AI-powered offerings are proving to have a positive impact, but to truly rebuild trust, vendors will need to show how they add value to more than just the technologies they sell,” said Mark Wojtasiak, vice president of research and strategy at Vectra AI.
Trust between practitioners and vendors has certainly been broken, so the introduction of AI tools may take some convincing, but almost everyone (89%) plans to use more AI tools to replace outdated threat detection and response.