Breaking the Cycle of Alert Fatigue: How to Prioritize Critical Vulnerabilities
Security teams are increasingly overwhelmed by the sheer volume of alerts generated by detection tools. While detection capabilities have improved over time, this has led to an unintended consequence: alert fatigue. The rapid proliferation of alerts—many of which lack critical context—makes it difficult for security teams to prioritize and address the most urgent vulnerabilities.
Half of organizations have critical security debt, and with no clear way to prioritize remediation efforts, teams are forced into a cycle of reaction. The situation worsens daily as new vulnerabilities are discovered, but remediation efforts lag far behind. This challenge is not only stressful for security professionals but also risky for the organization, as the potential for undetected threats increases.
Critical Questions, Unclear Answers
Every time an alert is triggered, security analysts are left to answer several critical questions:
- Is the vulnerability legitimate?
- Where did it originate?
- Which asset is at risk, and how valuable is that asset?
- Who in the organization owns the asset?
Detection tools often fail to provide answers to these essential questions, leaving analysts to perform manual research—a time-consuming process in a world of overflowing alerts. This lack of context forces analysts to make educated guesses, potentially leading to misdirected efforts. Developers, receiving vague or incomplete remediation tickets, struggle to understand the urgency of issues and are bogged down by this unproductive workflow.
Without proper prioritization and context, vulnerabilities pile up faster than they can be remediated, weakening organizational security posture and increasing business risk across industries.
The Path to Proactive Risk Management
To escape the cycle of alert fatigue, security teams must quickly gain a comprehensive understanding of risk in their cloud-native applications. One key aspect of managing risk is understanding that application risk is the result of two main factors: the likelihood of exploitation and the potential impact.
Many teams rely on models like CVSS (Common Vulnerability Scoring System) and EPSS (Exploit Prediction Scoring System) to assess likelihood. While these systems offer valuable insights, they fail to provide the context needed to assess the real impact. For example, a critical vulnerability in a non-production, low-value asset like a test server may have little impact, despite its high severity rating.
Security teams must move beyond severity alone and consider the actual risk based on their own unique environments and assets. Without this broader context, vulnerabilities that seem urgent in theory may be less pressing in practice.
Alert Fatigue: When Everything’s an Emergency, Nothing Is
As organizations face an overwhelming number of vulnerabilities, severity analysis often becomes the default method for prioritization. However, when every vulnerability is treated as an emergency, analysts are left overwhelmed, and true security crises—those that are both likely and impactful—may be overlooked. This is the core of the alert fatigue cycle.
The solution lies in integrating more context into the risk analysis process. This enables security teams to distinguish between real emergencies and minor issues, helping them focus on the most pressing threats and respond proactively.
Breaking Down Silos in Application Security with ASPM
Another obstacle to effective risk management is the fragmented nature of security tools. Traditional security tools like Application Security Testing (AST) and Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) operate in silos, each providing valuable insights but failing to offer a comprehensive view across the entire application pipeline.
- AST tools focus on vulnerabilities in code but don’t provide visibility into runtime environments.
- CNAPP tools track runtime vulnerabilities but lack insight into the development stages of the application lifecycle.
To address this gap, a new class of security tools has emerged—Application Security Posture Management (ASPM). These tools are designed to unify data from multiple sources and offer contextual analysis, helping teams to prioritize vulnerabilities and remediate them efficiently.
ASPM tools bridge the gap between different detection tools by consolidating their findings and adding much-needed context. While ASPM tools don’t replace detection tools, they enhance their value by filtering out noise and highlighting the most critical vulnerabilities.
Veracode Risk Manager: A Unified Approach to Risk Remediation
Veracode Risk Manager is a next-level ASPM tool designed by security experts to help security teams break free from alert fatigue by identifying and prioritizing critical risks across their cloud-native applications. Unlike basic ASPM tools, Veracode Risk Manager’s focus is on delivering actionable insights that streamline remediation efforts.
Here’s how Veracode Risk Manager empowers security teams to take control of application risk:
- Full Visibility Across Tools
It consolidates findings from various security tools, giving a unified risk view across the application pipeline. This helps teams identify the most critical vulnerabilities in the specific context of their environment. - Identify Root Causes of Risk
Veracode Risk Manager links runtime issues to their codebase origins, allowing analysts to address root causes and fix multiple issues at once. - Targeted Solutions for Efficient Remediation
It offers targeted solutions based on the context of each vulnerability, grouping issues and providing multiple remediation options. It integrates with existing workflows to create detailed tickets for developers, improving remediation efficiency.
Case Study: Revolutionizing Risk Management at a Financial Services Firm
A global financial services provider faced a similar challenge: despite investing heavily in security detection tools, the lack of context left its analysts unable to effectively prioritize and remediate vulnerabilities. After implementing Veracode Risk Manager, the company saw a significant improvement in risk management:
- A 10x increase in issues remediated per day
- 5.7 hours saved per analyst per day
- A 50% reduction in overall risk score
- Improved collaboration across security and development teams
By streamlining the remediation process and providing clear, actionable insights, Veracode Risk Manager empowered the organization to reduce security risk significantly while optimizing its security portfolio.
Moving Beyond Alert Fatigue
Alert fatigue doesn’t have to be the status quo. By adopting an advanced ASPM tool like Veracode Risk Manager, security teams can break free from the noise of excessive alerts and focus on what matters most: proactively addressing critical vulnerabilities. With unified risk visibility, root-cause analysis, and targeted remediation capabilities, Veracode Risk Manager helps businesses secure their cloud-native applications quickly and effectively, ensuring they stay ahead of evolving threats while driving business agility.
