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There are only a couple of moments between stopping a breach and suffering its consequences, so every single second counts. All five of these real incidents reported by our SOC reaffirm CyberMaxx’s “Big R” approach. I believe they all represent one thing: a mindset shift from passively using automated alerting to notify teams about incidents, to actively responding using human instinct and careful judgment.
Response Is the New Benchmark
Speed without action is meaningless, which means the old “alert and notify” model (which many security teams still rely on) is outdated. I know metrics might look good from the outside, but they mean nothing if we can’t stop the threat. At the end of the day, the only thing that actually matters is how quickly we respond, because rapid response is what protects our ability to maintain normal operations in the face of an attack.
This is the philosophy behind CyberMaxx’s “Big R,” which is designed to compress the time between initial detection and a specific containment action. It reframes MDR to focus heavily on incident response, containment, and eradication rather than alert count. Our 60-minute benchmark for High-Severity alerts is about making smart decisions that actually stop the threat, rather than racing the clock with automation tools.
The Human Element Makes All the Difference
What often gets overlooked is the amount of work that goes into an automated alert before it ever appears. Analysts understand environments and build deep context over time, enabling them to move quickly when it counts. Automated systems might alert quicker, but without the background instinct behind them, it doesn’t translate into effective action. There’s also the issue that automation can only scan for what it’s told to see, while humans use their skills and expertise to spot what isn’t there. The essential role of human instinct stands out in every single SOC story.
In multiple cases, just acting on “a hunch” at the first sign of trouble has prevented full compromises. “Think like an adversary. Defend like a guardian” is a mindset that all of our analysts adopt, because it reflects a culture where every team member questions every assumption, and prioritizes accuracy over speed.
Real-Time Awareness Saves the Day
I’ve seen many incidents where seconds make all the difference. In five recent incidents shared in Tales From the SOC Part 2, the common thread was how much real-time awareness saved the day. Here’s a brief rundown of what we found, and how we were able to catch it:
- In one incident, we flagged suspicious scanning linked to a zero-day and then contained it within an hour.
- During a pen test, an analyst spotted a real attacker pretending to be part of the test.
- When we uncovered a malicious inbox rule on a Microsoft 365 user account, we correlated email and endpoint logs to expose a hidden compromise that might have gone unnoticed.
- After a single phishing click led to 33 infections, quick correlation and escalation stopped it in its tracks before it could cause widespread damage.
- A healthcare user’s infection from a fake research site was contained in just 34 minutes, and we even reverse-engineered the malware to prevent future hits.
Each of these incidents shows how relying on our instincts and relentlessly following through can turn a potential disaster into nothing more than a minor blip.
We Need Human Analysts Who Are Trained to Trust Their Instincts
While AI might be good at scanning large amounts of data and identifying potential issues, its algorithmic decision engine can’t make the same determinations as human instinct. This is exactly why our analysts have been trained and trusted to rely on their gut feelings to interpret context and nuance. They can use their instincts to judge whether a signal actually matters and to prioritize it properly, so they can act right there and then if needed.
As I’ve already mentioned, what matters is responding quickly, and this means building a readiness mindset into our operations. Tools can point to signals, but at the end of the day, we need humans to look at them and decide which ones matter. That’s why we need to train our teams to rely on their own judgment, so they can think critically and act. If we can build a culture of trust and continuous learning in our organizations, we can empower them to do exactly that.
Human Readiness is What Matters
Instead of wasting our time trying to figure out how we can use the latest tools to chase alert times, I want us to turn our focus back to what really matters: building human readiness. Alerts are just vanity metrics—real security is about trained analysts putting aside their dashboards and acting on instinct.
