What is Alert Fatigue? 4 Ways to Mitigate It and Prevent Burnout

Beep, beep, ding, ding - the origins of alert fatigue.

Alert fatigue is not a new phenomenon. This happens when cybersecurity professionals become desensitized after dealing with an overwhelming number of alerts, so they start to overlook or ignore them and have slower response times. In most cases of alert fatigue, employees fail to respond in time due to the exhaustion they experience from alerts and notifications.

Alert fatigue is believed to be a leading cause of the 2013 targeted data breach, which resulted in the theft of credit card and personal information of approximately 40 million customers. This is a concern for many companies and requires special attention. But how do you mitigate alert mitigation? Let's find out.

A real fight for cybersecurity professionals

The term fatigue alert was first coined in 2004 by The Joint Commission, a US-based non-profit hospital accrediting organization, to declare the effectiveness of clinical alarms as the standard for hospitals. It has since become popular for many companies dealing with alerts, including cybersecurity.

While ignoring messages or app notifications may not negatively impact your daily life, the ramifications can be serious for cybersecurity professionals and their organizations. According to RiskIQ's 1 Evil Internet Minute Report 2021, cybercrime costs businesses $1.79 million every 60 seconds.

A 2018 survey, just four years ago, found that 27% of IT professionals receive more than a million security alerts per day (take a break and let them in ), while the majority (67%) are bombarded with 100,000 alerts per day. . SMBs are not spared from the deluge of alerts either, hit by 4,000 cyberattacks every day.

And that number isn't expected to drop any time soon. A related study from the same year found that alerts were increasing and security personnel could only handle an average of 12,000 alerts per week.

Cybersecurity's Great Resignation

It's no surprise that cybersecurity professionals face burnout. Even with a large team, managing over 2,000 notifications a day is mentally taxing. Imagine being in firefighter mode every 8 hours of a typical work day, sometimes even longer.

A recent report from Panther Labs revealed that up to 80% of security engineers suffer from burnout. Additionally, 45% of respondents to the third edition of Deep Instinct's annual Voice of SecOps 2 report consider leaving the industry altogether due to stress. Forty-six percent of the same respondents said they know at least one peer who left cybersecurity in the past year due to stress.

CISOs are burning out and quitting at an even more alarming rate. 49% of 1,000 respondents in the same report are considering leaving the industry due to increasing stress levels.

It's not just about people quitting their jobs, but also about the damage done to the industry itself. The industry is losing talent for good, and there is unlikely to be a fair replacement rate for them. Even though more people are entering the industry than leaving it, it takes time for new entrants to catch up.

Not all alerts are created equal

So why are there so many alerts? Monitoring tools such as Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) and Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) emit...