Cybersecurity alert fatigue: what it is and how SOC teams can fight back

Every day, cybersecurity teams are flooded with alerts—malware detections, login anomalies, endpoint events, firewall triggers. In theory, this flood is meant to help. In practice, it often does the opposite.

The problem is alert fatigue. And if you work in a SOC or lead a security team, you’ve likely experienced it firsthand.

According to a Gartner research, false positives and alert fatigue remain top challenges in security operations.

A 2023 study found that out of thousands of everyday alerts, around 83% turn out to be false alarms, and only a few are real threats.

Such a flood of mostly useless alerts wastes time, drives up costs and wears down analysts, slowing incident response: 67% of alerts eventually get ignored because security analysts are unable to deal with them.

Emotional exhaustion and operational blind spots are common outcomes of alert fatigue that might lead to serious consequences.

One of the brightest examples is the Target breach of 2013. Target’s security tools detected malicious activity early, but the alerts were buried beneath routine noise. Analysts ignored them, delaying response; by the time the breach was recognized, data on over 40 million payment cards had been stolen.

Alert fatigue impacts nearly everyone in the security chain:

• Tier 1 analysts, overwhelmed by low-priority alerts
• Incident response teams, trying to stitch together signals from disparate tools
• SOC managers, under pressure to hit SLA targets and retain staff
• Security leaders, tasked with showing value from increasingly complex ecosystems

Even DevOps teams may suffer from false escalations and excessive alerts, especially in hybrid environments with lots of tools.

And when the pressure becomes too much, people start to leave. Alert fatigue often leads to team attrition, which only adds more stress to those who remain. Managers are left juggling limited resources, while recruiters scramble to fill roles—just to keep day-to-day operations running.

• High false positive rates: According to studies, the overwhelming majority of alerts are often deemed noise. Without quality detection logic and context, analysts are stuck chasing ghosts.
• Manual triage bottlenecks: Analysts spend over half their time on non-actionable alerts, wasting effort and delaying response.
• Tool sprawl: A typical SOC can use several dozen tools, many of which generate independent alerts. Over 40% of security professionals report that their tools don’t provide enough context, and 32% say they ignore alerts they no longer trust.
• No centralized view: Alerts scattered across tools fragment visibility. Without a central place to investigate and collaborate, analysts lose time and miss connections.
• Lack of prioritization: Without severity scoring, asset value or business context, every alert looks urgent—even when it’s not.

Fighting alert fatigue isn’t just about silencing notifications. It’s about working smarter: tuning your detection logic, prioritizing what matters and giving analysts the right environment to work in.

One place to begin is by reducing noise at the source. You may consider working with detection engineers to fine-tune SIEM and EDR rules, disable unnecessary alerts and make use of analyst feedback.

A centralized platform like TheHive can help filter and normalize alerts from multiple sources, minimizing distractions and identifying duplicates before they reach analysts.

Consider automating routine tasks like indicator extraction, observable reputation checks and threat intelligence lookups to free analysts for more critical work.

For example, the Cortex engine inside TheHive allows to automatically trigger observable investigations the moment an alert is ingested.

Deepen your alerting. You may use severity scores, asset classification, threat context and historical correlation to focus attention on what matters.

TheHive supports structured tagging, case severity levels and context-aware correlation, letting teams escalate intelligently, not reactively.

Centralizing tools into one platform can help teams make sense of alerts more quickly.

A purpose-built incident response platform like TheHive can become your central viewpoint for alerts, cases, evidence and collaboration, eliminating tab fatigue and blind spots. It also makes it easier to monitor alert sources or detection rules that tend to generate false positives. Leveraging TheHive’s dashboards, teams can spot noisy inputs more easily—and use that to fine-tune their detection logic over time.

False positives? Slow sources? When analysts can easily share what’s ineffective, that feedback contributes to continuous improvement and helps surface blind spots for the entire team.

TheHive supports comments, case linking, custom fields, tagging and customizable postmortem reports. All these expand team knowledge about ongoing incidents and let analysts adapt security case management to their needs.

The more alerts your team receives, the more critical it becomes to handle them with structure: context, consistency and clarity.

Specialized incident response case management platforms built for high-volume environments (like TheHive) address exactly that. By centralizing alerts from multiple sources, facilitating enrichment, supporting analyst collaboration and enabling feedback loops, they reduce alert fatigue at its root, especially when paired with automating routine processes.

No platform can eliminate false positives or prevent alert storms entirely. But with the right foundation in place, your team doesn’t have to drown in volume. They can focus on what’s real, respond with confidence and stay resilient under pressure. The SOC gains clarity: faster investigations, lower operational risk and smarter cost control, ensuring resilience and measurable business value.