If you are like many of us, the urge to toss aside your smartphone after wading through a deluge of cybersecurity warnings, doomsday articles, and frightening blogs about cybersecurity grows stronger each day. With so much information about cyber threats, "education" may have turned the corner into cybersecurity fatigue—a danger of its own. It may seem ironic to talk about cybersecurity alarm and alert fatigue during Cybersecurity Month, but bear with us.
Cybersecurity is complicated enough without cybersecurity alarm fatigue. IT professionals both in-house and on managed services teams are inundated with alerts from cybersecurity and monitoring solutions – even those tools that have been finely tuned can create havoc in some circumstances. So, to kick off Cybersecurity Month, let's talk about how to address the challenge of managing cybersecurity fatigue.
Cybersecurity alert fatigue occurs when people are overwhelmed with so many alerts, alarms, and articles that it leads to desensitization and eventually a reduced ability or desire to respond and explore actual threats. Have you ever been in a hospital visiting someone, and in the background, you hear an almost constant stream of beeps for extended periods? Alert fatigue in healthcare is a critical challenge, with recent studies revealing an average of more than 59,000 alarms over 12 days. Contributing to the healthcare issues are statistics the percentage of false alarms can be as high as 99% – a staggering statistic that helps clarify how and why healthcare workers have become desensitized to those alerts.
Alert fatigue in IT security is rapidly approaching that critical point as well. Not only are highly sensitive solutions creating alarms, alerts, reports, and emails that must be dealt with—people are bombarded with emails and articles filled with FUD (fear, uncertainty, and dread) on social media and news coverage.
The question becomes, how do we combat this problem, or even prevent cyber alert fatigue? We can't stop educating the public about the truly damaging after-effects of cyber attacks or risk inadvertently encouraging a lackadaisical approach to security. Instead, we have three tips for lessening the impact of fatigue factors on your organization, helping you better navigate cybersecurity and keep your defenses strong.
Work with your MSP to reduce cybersecurity alerts
The noise from false cybersecurity alerts and alarms, notification emails and security reports can create cognitive overload for those on your staff who are tasked with handling cybersecurity alert monitoring and reporting. The best way to deal with the cyber alert desensitization that accompanies cognitive overload is to reduce the amount of data thrown at those employees. This doesn't mean turning off alerting and reporting. Instead, work with your MSP to help create an environment where only critical security alerts interrupt the day. Managed services providers can optimize cybersecurity and monitoring solutions to reduce the number of notifications delivered to their team and yours.
Your MSP can also provide training for your team so they can quickly discern situations that might need immediate attention. For example, Exigent's powerful Dark Web monitoring solution has a detailed dashboard that can be overwhelming without the right guidance. Security training solutions are another great example of tools that can create too much noise if not optimized and well-understood. Best practices include issuing threat alerts only to staff directly impacted, fine-tuning what actions trigger security alerts to reduce false positives and unnecessary information, and refining solutions to deliver only the relevant data required for action.
Simplify cybersecurity processes such as MFA and password policies
The nature of policies and procedures is to provide detail—however, we have all created processes that were convoluted or excessive. When it comes to the security actions we ask of our team, straightforward procedures are more effective simply because your team can easily and quickly take required actions. For example, a password policy shouldn't require more complexity than necessary, and rules should be easy to find and remember. Same with multifactor authentication—can you create single sign-on (SSO) for your applications? Can you use one authentication app to manage all your critical application security steps? Sometimes procedures can't be streamlined, but the more you focus on creating a simple, positive user experience, the more likely your team will engage and participate, improving cybersecurity across the board.
Train your team to raise awareness and limit cybersecurity overload
We've discussed before that your employees are your best defense against cyber attacks. However, there is a significant difference between security awareness and FUD. When evaluating security awareness training solutions, start with your trusted MSP partner. Ask detailed questions about how the program works and what sort of reporting and support you will get when it comes to the solution's alerts about employee participation and programmatic testing. Again, you want to be sure your employees feel empowered and educated, not overwhelmed and helpless.
How Exigent Guides Customers Toward Cybersecurity Best Practices
At Exigent, we believe in true partnership. That means we don't believe in dropping solutions into your environments and walking away, leaving your team battling cyber threat monitoring fatigue. By collaborating with each customer's liaison and team members, we do our best to avoid fatigue situations by fine-tuning cybersecurity solutions to reduce false alarms, offering alert management, explaining solution notifications and dashboards, and streamlining cybersecurity processes. If you want to learn more about our approach to cybersecurity and partnership, let's connect.
