{
  "id": 7744565,
  "title": "Why Most SOCs Alert on the Wrong Things (and How to Fix It)",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/09/16/why-most-socs-alert-on-the-wrong-things-and-how-to-fix-it",
  "topic": "tech",
  "section": "Tech",
  "published": "2026-09-16T08:28:00.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "Dev.to",
    "slug": "dev-to",
    "url": "https://dev.to/fasih_mehdi/why-most-socs-alert-on-the-wrong-things-and-how-to-fix-it-dmk"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "Working inside a Security Operations Center (SOC) for an extended period reveals the reality of alert fatigue. Hundreds of alerts flood analysts daily, with most being mere noise, while the critical one often gets buried among the others. After a decade in SOC environments, both as an analyst and now as SIEM engineer, I've come to see the issue not as a tooling problem, but a design one. Most SIEM deployments begin by enabling a library of out-of-the-box correlation rules supplied by vendors. Initially, this seems beneficial. However, soon, the SOC is overwhelmed by alerts. Treating more alerts as greater security is counterproductive, leading to skimpy investigation rather than thorough analysis, which can cause real incidents to be overlooked. The harsh truth is that most default rules are not tailored to specific environments. They aim to be broadly applicable across all potential customer setups, which often means they don't apply well to any one organization's unique authentication patterns, service account behaviors, or business hours and end up firing constantly without any real significance. Alerting on the wrong things can manifest in several ways: overly broad rules without context, low-value informational events being given the same priority as genuine indicators of lateral movement, and a lack of mapping to actual attack tactics and techniques. Static thresholds in dynamic environments and the absence of real attack behavior mapping are also part of the problem. To improve SOC outcomes, the focus should shift from counting occurrences (did something happen X times) to recognizing meaningful attacker behavior patterns. This involves starting with MITRE ATT&CK, mapping existing detections to tactics and techniques, ensuring rules are properly tuned through real traffic before being activated, adding context to alerts like asset criticality, user roles, and related events, and retiring rules that haven't yielded true positives for months. A SOC's real capacity isn't measured by handling alerts but by catching genuine threats before damage occurs. Reducing the daily alert volume by more than half through such tuning and redesign, without losing any real detection capability, often results in improved coverage as analysts can now focus on what truly matters. Essentially, the root cause of drowning in alerts lies not in having a bigger team or a more advanced tool, but in revisiting detection logic and asking, \"Does this alert actually tell me something?\"",
  "summary": "If you've worked inside a Security Operations Center for more than a few months, you already know the feeling: hundreds of alerts a day, most of them noise, and the one alert that actually mattered buried somewhere in the queue. After five years working inside SOC environments — as an analyst, and now as the engineer responsible for the SIEM itself — I've come to believe this isn't a tooling…",
  "key_points": [
    "Most SIEM deployments start with vendor-supplied correlation rules, leading to alert overload.",
    "Improvement requires shifting focus to meaningful attacker behavior patterns and proper rule tuning."
  ],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}