Oct 29, 2024

A Human Approach to Finding the Signal in the Noise

Sometimes too much information is worse than too little. That is especially true in cybersecurity. Organizations should not ignore real threats. But they also should not drown in irrelevant data. Should you ignore every vulnerability disclosure, antivirus alert, or threat actor claiming they have already breached you? No. Often you legally cannot, thanks to government […]

Sometimes too much information is worse than too little. That is especially true in cybersecurity. Organizations should not ignore real threats. But they also should not drown in irrelevant data.

Should you ignore every vulnerability disclosure, antivirus alert, or threat actor claiming they have already breached you? No. Often you legally cannot, thanks to government rules and industry standards. Should you instead run endless automated tools that promise to find every flaw? Probably not. The best place to operate is somewhere in between.

Organizations Already Have the Data They Need

A survey by ESG for Synack found that many organizations struggle to:

Keep up with open vulnerabilities.
Coordinate vulnerability management across many tools.
Make sense of automated scan results.

They already have the information they need. They just need help using it well.

How Synack Helps Find the Signal

Synack’s penetration testing as a service (PTaaS) platform solves these problems. A global squad of elite researchers, the Synack Red Team (SRT), continuously tests your security based on your specific needs. They write up what they find. But you only get the report after Synack’s vulnerability operations (VulnOps) team reviews it.

So you get current information on the flaws you actually care about: a weak feature in your mobile app, a misconfigured API, or something else. You do not have to dig through data that does not matter to you. Automated tools cannot do this. They only work within the rules set when they were built and deployed.

Automating vulnerability discovery is only half the battle

Automated tools have another limit: they ignore the human side of security. Alerts from antivirus, endpoint detection and response (EDR), and other tools do not resolve themselves. Usually a security operations center (SOC) has to decide what each alert means: investigate it, dismiss a false positive, or act another way.

Many SOCs are understaffed. A flood of alerts can help, but it can also cause alert fatigue. Proofpoint describes this as “a phenomenon that occurs when cybersecurity professionals are inundated with such a high volume of security alerts that it leads to a diminished ability to react effectively to and investigate real threats.” In short: too much noise drowns out the signal.

Finding the Right Signal-to-Noise Ratio

Of course, every organization reports security differently. Some want only the basics. Others want as much detail as possible. The goal is the right signal-to-noise ratio for each one. A human-led approach gets far closer to that balance than automation alone ever could. Learn more about how Synack helps you strike that balance with vulnerability management.