Triage in Cybersecurity: There’s always a level of importance attached to every activity in life, from the type of food they eat to their preference for books during study time. For instance, during exam periods, one is more likely to focus on more challenging subjects than the simpler ones. The same applies to the cybersecurity landscape, where hundreds of alerts can be generated by a security monitoring tool in a day.

Thus, it might be hard for an organization’s security team to attend to all the alerts at the same time. So, there’s a need to adopt an approach — cybersecurity triage, which tries to categorize security alerts according to their level of importance. In this article, we will explore the meaning of cybersecurity triage, the three classifications of threats, and the benefits of triage.

What is Triage in Cybersecurity?

Triage originates from a medical term that means rotating the care provided to patients according to their urgency; the lack of resources mainly causes this. In the cybersecurity space, a lot of security alerts are generated within a day, and many of them end up being false positives. False positives in cybersecurity are alerts that incorrectly speculate about the possibility of a cyber threat even though there’s no real one present. Thus, false positives can make it hard for the security operations center (SOC) of an organization to attend to high-priority security breaches.

This is where triage in cybersecurity comes in, as it enables security alerts to be arranged in chronological order, depending on their priority. Moreover, the introduction of AI enabled incident triage solutions like Radiant Security has significantly improved the ability to detect easily which events need to be addressed quickly and false positives. One of the most significant advantages of using AI incident triage is that it doesn’t require much human input, as it integrates machine learning and artificial intelligence.

How Does Cybersecurity Triage Work?

Addressing high-priority security alerts first doesn’t mean that cybersecurity triage doesn’t attend to the rest; it only tries to address issues according to their level of urgency and impact. To reach this objective, it usually classifies any alerts entering the organization’s network into three categories:

● High Priority Alerts

High-priority alerts are immediately attended to, as they can significantly damage or halt an organization’s digital operations if they aren’t addressed immediately. An excellent example of this type of alert is cross-site scripting and malware, as they can seriously impact customer experience and overall business performance.

● Medium Priority Alerts

Medium-priority alerts can impact overall business performance, and one can quickly tell that customers or users aren’t having a good experience with the organization’s services. However, an important part of medium-priority alerts is that the security operations center can choose to delay responding to these alerts pending when they are done with more important tasks.

● Low Priority Alerts

Unlike what many believe about these types of alerts, they are not entirely harmless, even though they do not have any significant effect on an organization’s performance. They are not really noticeable from the surface, as one has to take a closer look at the organization’s system metrics to detect them.

Importance of Cybersecurity Triage

● Efficiency in the Resource Allocation

One of the primary goals of cybersecurity triage is to reduce resource waste by allocating resources to the right and most pressing issues. Thus, by categorizing alerts into high, medium, and low priority, the security operations center focuses on the most important things before addressing the least significant.

● Resolving Crucial Threats

Without cybersecurity triage, an organization might channel its efforts and resources to resolve threats that have little or no impact on its operations and customer satisfaction. For instance, they might spend a lot of resources trying to fix the cause of a spike in network traffic when they should focus on an ongoing malware attack. That’s why using a Gen AI

SOC co-pilot like Radiant Security is important, as it resolves threats after in-depth investigations.

● Rapid Response to Threats

By incorporating next-level AI cybersecurity triage systems within an organization’s security team, they are assured of providing rapid response to threats. Automation, powered by AI, enables thorough incident analysis and specific response plans, further reducing response times. Through the three classifications of threats, the security team won’t waste time on less important threats, leading to immediate response to issues with more impact and urgency.

● Enhanced Threat Detection and Prevention

The implementation of triage in an organization provides learning opportunities that can help employees in detecting and preventing threats and vulnerabilities. For instance, some of the patterns detected during a phishing attack can help employees detect and prevent such things from happening in the future.

Wrapping Up

Cybersecurity triage tries to bring what is more important to the attention of the security operations center instead of tackling security issues randomly. To do this, security issues are often classified according to their level of urgency: high, medium, and low-priority threats. Implementing triage in an organization comes with many benefits, such as rapid response to threats, efficiency in resource allocation, improved threat detection and prevention, and resolving crucial security threats.