Prophet Security Raises $30M Series A, Expanding Agentic AI Across Security Operations.
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It has never been harder to deliver exceptional outcomes in a security operations environment than today. As a former SOC analyst, I empathize with the persistent challenges of managing an onslaught of grueling false positive alerts with limited context (looking at you DNS alerts). However, there have been three significant changes over the past decade that have made SOC analysis and management jobs even more challenging.
The security perimeter is larger than it’s ever been. With the proliferation of SaaS applications, cloud workloads, and distributed workforces, organizations are adopting security tools that extend visibility into different facets of their network environments. Things like cloud audit logging and autoscaling workload monitoring that were in their infancy 10 years ago are table stakes today. While increased visibility enables your team to respond to impactful threats that have adapted to modern workplaces, it also adds strain for maintaining consistent and effective response.
SOC analysts must now learn how to gather data from a wide array of security tools across domains (cloud, endpoint, etc.), and then hone the right analytical process to identify and respond to threats. This takes a mental toll, especially when your workflow spans multiple vendor consoles and different contexts in a single day.
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SOC leaders now carry the burden of finding security experts that can accurately investigate alerts across their entire technology stack, but they’re almost impossible to recruit. Additionally, the need to monitor a broader perimeter leads to increased SIEM data costs and product investments that cut directly into hiring budgets.
Increased visibility serves as both a blessing and a curse for security teams. While more telemetry brings about the potential for higher fidelity and more responsive security outcomes, it also significantly increases the alert volume for your operational teams – often without a tangible benefit. This “alert barrage” from security vendors forces most organizations to take one or more of these three paths:
Responding to every alert that crosses the wire, especially false positive activity, can be monotonous and stressful, often feeling like there is no end or reward in sight. It’s a dangerous recipe that quickly leads to analyst mistakes, burnout, and ultimately high job turnover. In fact, a study by Mimecast found that one-third of SOC analysts are considering leaving their role due to stress and burnout.
Investing in automation engineering has the promise of easing alert fatigue, but the responsibility is often owned by a separate team that doesn’t have to respond to alerts. That disconnect can lead to overlooked tuning, or worse, custom noisy detections the SOC must manage.
As a SOC leader you’re faced with the delicate balance of maintaining employee morale and managing the risk of false negatives due to overtuning detections or disabling alert sources altogether – both of which create significant operational risk.
Before the advent of ransomware, most notable cyber crimes were reserved for a small percentage of globally recognized businesses that harbored intellectual property, political intelligence, or large scale payment processing that would attract the attention of a sophisticated threat.
Today, every organization is a potential target for ransomware, with ransom demands skyrocketing along with the risk of business disruption through mass encryption and secondary extortion from data theft. Compounding the issue, ransomware operators are moving faster. Secureworks cited the median time between initial access and payload delivery to be 24 hours for ransomware actors, and Rapid7 in their Vulnerability Intelligence report found that 56% of vulnerabilities they observed in 2022 were exploited within seven days of public disclosure.
This change in the threat landscape demands hypervigilance from security operations teams along with close coordination with internal IT and engineering teams to not only investigate, but remediate threats and external vulnerabilities immediately.
Universal ransomware risk forces SOC teams to not only be highly accurate but operate at a break-neck pace in order to protect against potential business shutdown. This leads to long hours, high degrees of stress, and new tasks like vulnerability management added to the never-ending todo list of security work.
SOC managers are under more pressure than ever with the expectation of flawless team precision and speed, further lowering morale.
It’s clear that the nature of security operations has rapidly evolved, and the current technology we’re using is struggling to keep up with the security demands of modern organizations and threat actors. Ultimately, a new approach is required that supercharges human analysts to fully investigate and respond to threats at machine speed rather than turning people into alert automatons.
We developed Prophet AI SOC Platform in order to address some of the key challenges of triaging, investigating, and responding to alerts. If you’re interested in supercharging your human analysts, request a demo of Prophet AI to learn how you can triage and investigate security alerts 10 times faster.
Security operations has become more complex due to a rapidly expanding attack surface, a surge in alert volumes, and the rising threat of ransomware. SOC analysts now face constant pressure to understand and investigate alerts across cloud, endpoint, identity, and more.
SOC analysts struggle with alert overload, inconsistent context across tools, and the mental strain of constantly switching between environments. These conditions often lead to burnout, mistakes, and high turnover.
Increased visibility from tools and telemetry sources can lead to overwhelming alert volumes without improving actual security outcomes. This forces SOC teams to either hire more staff, suppress alerts, or rely on brittle automation.
Ransomware has expanded its target range to include virtually all organizations, increasing urgency and workload in the SOC. Analysts must respond faster, often incorporating vulnerability management and tight coordination with IT and engineering.
The demand for analysts with broad technical knowledge across modern infrastructures has outpaced supply. Many SOC leaders also face budget constraints due to growing investments in tools and SIEM data, limiting their ability to hire.
Overtuning or disabling alerts to manage alert volume can lead to missed threats and delayed response. These decisions often trade short-term relief for long-term security risk.
AI SOC Analysts can dramatically reduce mean time to investigate (MTTI) and improve alert coverage. Teams using AI-enabled triage can investigate 10x faster and reduce reliance on manual processes, improving both accuracy and efficiency.
SOC managers can support morale by formalizing cross-training programs, rotating detection engineers into triage duty, and investing in tools that reduce repetitive manual work. Encouraging rest and recovery is also critical in high-pressure environments.
Discover how AI SOC Agents and other technologies are reshaping security operations
Grant Oviatt
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Grant is the Head of Security Operations at Prophet Security.
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