CISO Details How This Solution Helps His Team With Security Alert Fatigue

“We don’t generate [security] alerts. We reduce them,” Intezer’s CEO said.

Michael Calderin, CISO of Yageo Group

Cybersecurity alert fatigue is real. Many organizations of all sizes now have complex cybersecurity stacks with a multitude of products all issuing their own alerts.

Imagine living in your home with your smoke alarm, connected doorbell, router, and any other connected device constantly bombarding you with alerts and messages. It would be enough to drive anyone mad and, like the boy who cried wolf, perhaps make you miss a critical alert as your immunity to the bells and whistles hardens.

This is a very real problem security teams are facing. They are overburdened with alerts making it difficult for them to suss out the ones they really need to take action on.

One CISO has implemented a solution in the form of technology from a company called Intezer that he says helps with alert fatigue and frees up his team to deal with the most serious threats to their business.

“I actually came to learn of Intezer through my security operations center manager,” Michael Calderin, CISO of Yageo Group – an electronics components company – told MES Computing.

Calderin said that with Intezer, his team can quickly sift through alerts and respond quicker to more critical ones.

“We have a very lean team, and so automation is really critical to us. The amount of time that it takes to triage an event and understand what's really happening can eat into our ability to respond quickly. So, the more information that we have up front when we get eyes on screen, the faster a human can make a decision about what to do,” he said.

How Intezer Works

Itai Tevet is the co-founder and CEO of Israel-based Intezer. He is also a longtime cybersecurity professional. His experience in cybersecurity, he said, is what lead to the idea of Intezer.

Itai Tevet, co-founder and CEO, Intezer

As a cybersecurity professional, “I had way too many security alerts, too much work to do, and not enough people on my team,” Tevet said. “This sparked the idea to create Intezer, where we basically put ourselves as a mission to solve the talent shortage problem in our industry, in cyber.”

Intezer, he said, is an “AI model that can emulate how human security analysts investigate alerts and make decisions.”

Helping security teams deal with the volume of alerts they receive daily is the core use case of Intezer, Tevet said.

Intezer In Use

Intezer’s technology takes help desk tickets and adds “more contextual information to them that our team then can quickly read through in 30 to 60 seconds and have a good idea whether this is a false positive,” said Calderin, whose team has been using Intezer for a year.

As far as the alert threats Intezer has helped with, Calderin said that the solution had been particularly helpful with “info stealer attacks.”

“When the bad guys want to look at information that might be stored in a web browser ... it’s been very helpful to understand just what activity is taking place, how widespread the issue might be, and then forward it to the right person on our team to respond,” he said.

He also said that having Intezer has helped reduce potential costs.

“If we were to hire the amount of staff needed to respond as quickly, the cost could have been significantly higher,’ he said.

Tevet summed up Intezer’s value: “99.9 percent of security solutions, they find bad stuff and they generate alerts for you. We do the exact opposite. We don't generate any alert. We help you to reduce them.”