Why Alert Volume Matters: Cutting Through the Noise

Making Sense of MITRE Evaluations

The MITRE Engenuity ATT&CK Evaluations serve as a benchmark for assessing how well security vendors detect and respond to real-world threats. However, without a standardized ranking system and with vendors interpreting results differently, making sense of the findings can be a challenge.

That’s where Forrester’s independent analysis comes in. It provides an unbiased, expert-driven breakdown of MITRE’s new alert tracking metric—highlighting how well vendors prioritize high-value, actionable detections.

“Tracking alert volume made the results more tangibly relevant than ever.”

Finding the Right Balance in Threat Detection

The most effective EDR and XDR solutions balance rich threat visibility and context with low noise. This is achieved through powerful correlation capabilities that ensure analysts are not bombarded by separate alerts for every suspicious action. Instead, they review a short and well triaged list of incidents that connect alerts into a context-rich attack story. This enables teams to respond promptly to critical threats and avoid business impact.

As highlighted in The Forrester's Analysis of The 2024 MITRE Engenuity ATT&CK Evaluation (read the report: “Figure 3 Volume Of Alerts By Severity”), some security solutions generate significantly more noise and log data than others.

Too many alerts—no matter how detailed— hinders security team performance, increasing the risk of missed or delayed responses to critical threats. A well-balanced security platform should provide context-rich alerts with actionable insights, allowing security teams to make informed decisions quickly. For teams to maximize efficiency and effectiveness, they need solutions that intelligently correlate alerts and reduce volume without sacrificing context - ensuring focus on what truly matters.

Every Alert Comes at a Cost

Alert fatigue isn’t just a productivity issue—it’s a financial burden. Every unnecessary alert adds to operational costs, particularly when routed through a Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) system for further correlation. These costs can quickly escalate, impacting budgets and resource allocation.

Beyond the sheer volume of alerts, organizations must consider the direct financial impact—from SIEM ingestion fees to the time and effort spent by security teams filtering through low-value detections.

The Cost of an Attack

Forrester’s analysis highlights just how much alert overload can cost. If 10,000 endpoints are hit with LockBit ransomware, SIEM ingestion costs “range from just $0.006 with some vendors to $471,192 with others”—for a single attack.

With such dramatic cost disparities, organizations must carefully evaluate which vendors optimize detections versus those that generate costly, excessive noise.

To help organizations quantify this impact, Forrester has developed a cost calculation tool included in The Forrester’s Analysis of the 2024 MITRE Engenuity ATT&CK Evaluation. This tool estimates the expenses tied to alert processing for different security solutions, making the financial impact of excessive alerts tangible and measurable.

We discussed some of these challenges in our blog, “The Numbers Game: Why Alert Volume and False Positives Matter in MITRE ATT&CK® Enterprise Evaluations 2024.”

In MITRE ATT&CK® Evaluations for Enterprise – Round 6, we believe Bitdefender stood out for its exceptional threat detection, actionable insights, and commitment to reducing alert fatigue. This performance builds on the 2024 MITRE Engenuity ATT&CK Evaluations for Managed Services, where Bitdefender led participants with the highest-scored actionability and the least amount of noise. For us, these results highlight the effectiveness of our MDR team and reinforce the strengths of our GravityZone Platform in delivering high-fidelity detections with minimal noise.

Close Security Gaps with Extended & Managed Threat Response

Whether through our tools or our services, Bitdefender ensures our customers get the insights they need without being overwhelmed with alerts.

Bitdefender GravityZone XDR: Minimum Noise. Maximum Efficiency

Powerful Correlation Capabilities

The GravityZone XDR platform automatically correlates threat signals across all attack surfaces and consolidates alerts into meaningful incident stories. This prevents analysts from being overwhelmed by fragmented alerts, instead presenting a clear, context-rich attack timeline.

Human-Readable Incident Analysis

Security teams need clarity, not complexity. GravityZone XDR provides a clear, human-readable attack summary and real-time visual representations of the full attack chain, helping analysts respond faster and more effectively.

Superior Detection Fidelity, Less Noise

Native sensors collect security-relevant events in a standardized format, leveraging extensive research from Bitdefender Labs and global threat intelligence. This ensures high-quality detections that filter out false positives and low-priority events, allowing security teams to focus on critical, actual threats.

Learn More about GravityZone XDR.

Managed Detection and Response: Address Security Challenges

Bitdefender MDR built on top of our best-in-class GravityZone XDR platform provides unmatched protection while reducing noise.

24x7 Security Coverage

Bitdefender MDR augments internal security teams with a global team of SOC analysts and threat researchers who help monitor, detect and respond to cyber threats 24/7.

Analysis, Not Alerts

Many MDR providers simply aggregate alerts and send them to end-user teams for review. Bitdefender MDR handles the entire alert lifecycle, analyzing data, and providing clear, actionable recommendations transparently in the MDR portal so users are only notified about what truly matters.

Learn more about Bitdefender Managed Detection and Response (MDR + SOC) and read our break down on the MITRE Engenuity ATT&CK Evaluations for Managed Services.

MITRE ATT&CK® Evaluations Reinforce Bitdefender’s Strengths

We believe the latest MITRE ATT&CK® Enterprise Evaluations 2024 reaffirms Bitdefender's commitment to:

Delivering exceptional threat detection
Providing actionable insights that matter
Reducing alert fatigue and security noise

Forrester’s Analysis of the 2024 MITRE Engenuity ATT&CK Evaluation helps security professionals understand the core differences in this evaluation, gain valuable insight on how security vendors detect attacker activity, and assess which solutions strike a balance between alert volume and actionable context.