Alert Prioritization and Guided Remediation: The future of EDR

Sleepless nights, missed threats, a deluge of notifications—the common symptoms of the bane of IT teams everywhere: Alert fatigue.

Out of the litany of problems IT teams face every day, alert fatigue might be among the most pressing—especially considering that 30 percent of EDR alerts are ignored by IT security teams. Simply put, it’s impossible to keep up when your tools aren’t helping you prioritize alerts.

Enter: Alert Prioritization and Guided Remediation.

Alert Prioritization and Guided Remediation is a feature of EDR Extra Strength that helps IT teams cut through the noise, using specialized threat intelligence to highlight the threats that truly need their attention.

But why do traditional approaches to EDR alert ranking lead to alert fatigue? And how does Alert Prioritization and Guided Remediation work to combat it?

Why Traditional EDR Is Inherently Exhausting

At its core, EDR has one job—to generate alerts of suspicious activity. The humans operating EDR also broadly have one job: to interpret and act on that suspicious activity.

But here’s the problem: “suspicious” could mean anything.

Let’s say an alert was generated in response to an employee installing a new piece of software attempting to modify system files. Traditional EDR doesn’t know if this is a benign program—it just flags the activity as suspicious. But “suspicious” could mean that the alert is a false positive, it could mean the alert is malicious but can be safely ignored; it could mean “This is a huge deal.”

In other words, IT teams can’t know how “bad” a suspicious alert is until it is investigated—an impossible task for each of the thousands of alerts generated by EDR daily. The end result is, of course, alert fatigue.

Traditional EDR is inherently exhausting. Without additional context, alerts become just too ambiguous to be actionable, meaning IT teams inevitably end up over-prioritizing less urgent threats while also overlooking severe ones.

How Alert Prioritization And Guided Remediation Works

Alert Prioritization and Guided Remediation helps you cut through the noise of traditional EDR by enriching alerts with external threat intelligence.

In this scenario, when an EDR product generates an alert, Alert Prioritization and Guided Remediation consults the threat intelligence service’s extensive database for relevant data. This data, which could include information from various antivirus solutions and user submissions, helps Alert Prioritization and Guided Remediation assess the legitimacy of the alert, clarifying whether the alert represents a genuine threat or a false positive.

Let’s illustrate using the same example from our section on the limitations of traditional EDR, when an alert was generated after an employee installed a new piece of software.

If threat intelligence data shows, for example, that 50 out of 60 antivirus solutions flagged the same file as malicious, it’s likely not a false positive.

Alternatively, if threat intelligence data shows that only 2 out of 60 antivirus solutions flagged the same file as malicious, it is likely that the alert is a false positive and can be safely ignored.

After the threat is externally validated to be a known bad, we turn to Phase 2: Guided Remediation.

When a prioritized threat is detected, Guided Remediation sends detailed remediation information directly to customers through text and email.

These communications direct customers to an EDR portal page that further details the identified threat, explaining what was found, why it is deemed a priority, and simple steps on how to remediate it. This ensures that users are not only alerted to potential threats, but also equipped with the information needed to take decisive action.

Business benefits to Alert Prioritization and Guided Remediation****Reduced alert fatigue

Alert Prioritization and Guided Remediation helps IT teams massively reduce the volume of alerts that need to be reviewed, saving them much-needed mental to focus on only the most critical threats.

Improved security posture

Alert Prioritization and Guided Remediation of threats allows for quicker detection and response to threats, minimizing attacker dwell time and reducing the potential damage that attackers can cause once in your systems.

Empowers smaller or less experienced teams

With the right solution, highly specialized staff become a less critical requirement when an organization has to keep up with the volume of EDR alerts. Alert Prioritization and Guided Remediation helps to level the playing field, helping smaller IT teams or those with lower levels of specialized security expertise identify and respond to threats on the fly.

Try EDR Extra Strength today

Automation is the name of the game when it comes to preventing burnout—and with Alert Prioritization and Guided Remediation, IT teams can finally ease their alert fatigue burdens.

Interested in learning more? Alert Prioritization and Guided Remediation is a part of our EDR Extra Strength product, which reimagines EDR to deliver superior protection in a single, easy-to-use package.

Get a free trial of Malwarebytes EDR Extra Strength.