Alert Fatigue Therapy: Fixing Broken Detection Rules

“False positives burn out analysts. False negatives burn down businesses.” Modern SOCs and security teams live in this tension, and most detection rules make it worse. Every analyst has a “hall of shame”: rules that fire hundreds of times a day and are ignored just as often. These aren’t just noisy; they actively hide real attacks.

This session is a hands-on deep dive into high-fidelity detection engineering. We move beyond simple “if X then Y” logic to focus on designing detections that produce meaningful signals in real-world environments. Drawing on practical frameworks, we will explore the core tradeoffs of defense; from deciding where to set the “sensitivity dial” of rules to understanding why perfect detection rules are impossible.

The session includes a live-style walkthrough of refactoring a noisy detection rule into a high-confidence, context-aware alert by applying enrichment, correlation, and better logic. We will look at how to move a detection from a raw, low-value event to a surgical alert that provides the stage, technique, and data validation an analyst needs instantly.

I will close by giving a repeatable workflow for high-count alerts; deciding when to fix the rule, when to group/aggregate, and when to disable detection rules that shouldn’t exist.

This is not a talk about tuning alerts, it’s about redesigning how detection rules are built.