Overheard our SOC analyst say something that made me freeze at my desk

I was grabbing coffee near the SOC pod last Tuesday and heard one of our senior analysts say 'eh, just run the report manually, the automation script is probably fine.' That one sentence really hit me. We have this automated threat hunting pipeline that pulls from 3 different SIEM sources and it's been running for 6 months without anyone checking its output. I went back and compared the automated reports against manual runs for 2 weeks. Found 14 alerts the automation had quietly dropped because of a parsing error in a log format update our firewall pushed 4 months ago. Nobody caught it because we all assumed the script was doing its job. Has anyone else found gaps like this where automation was silently failing without alerting you?

2 comments

2 Comments

brian_ward558d ago

Blew my mind how many false assumptions we build into automated workflows.

barbararamirez7d ago

Yeah I used to think if you just set up the automation right it would just work. But then we had this thing where a customer would submit a support ticket and the system would auto-reply with "we'll get back to you in 24 hours" even on weekends. Then the customer would email again and the automation would just send the same message. Nobody ever checked it because the system said it was handled. Took us three days to realize a real person was stuck in a loop with a robot. Completely changed how I look at these things now.