A vendor in Tulsa made me rethink my whole alert setup in 15 minutes

Honestly, I was on a call with a security vendor last week, not even really paying attention, just going through the motions of a demo. They asked me one simple thing: 'What does your SIEM actually do when it gets a critical alert at 2 AM?' I gave the usual answer about paging the on-call person. Then they said, 'No, I mean what does it do automatically, right now, before anyone wakes up?' And that hit different. I realized my whole flow was just 'alert goes out, hope someone sees it.' For six years I've been running this operation with a 4 person team, and we never built a single automated response. No quarantine, no IP block, nothing. We just waited. It took a sales pitch from a guy in Tulsa to point out that my alerts were basically just fancy email forwards. Now I'm mapping out some basic automation, even if it's just auto-disabling a VPN user on a failed login spree. Anyone else ever had a vendor casually expose a massive gap you somehow missed for years?

2 comments

2 Comments

parkerb751d ago

Trace the data back to what triggered the alert in the first place. We spent a month building auto quarantine rules only to find out half our alerts were firing on false positives from a misconfigured scanner, so we were blocking legit IPs and locking out our own finance team from the CRM. The real gap is that nobody ever checked if the alert itself was worth acting on, we just assumed any critical tag meant something real. Now we log the raw packet capture and the exact rule that tripped for every single auto action, and we review those once a week. That Tulsa vendor got you thinking about the response, but the detection quality is where the rot really sets in. Garbage in, garbage out, but with more credential lockouts.

xena_williams2d ago

Wait, have you actually tested what happens when your phone dies or your only on-call person is in a dead zone at that exact moment? Because I bet that's the real gap hiding under the automation one. We set up auto quarantine last year, thought we were golden, then found out our ticketing system and the firewall vendor had a handshake issue that silently dumped all the actions into a error log nobody checked. The alert fired, the automation fired, but the actual block never happened and we only caught it during a audit months later. So sure, build those auto responses, but build a status check that yells at you if the automated action fails too. Otherwise you end up with a whole new layer of stuff to ignore at 2 AM, just quieter.