What a weekend. It kicked off Wednesday night—alarms started screaming. Storm alert. Tornado alert. Flash flood alert. Lightning alert. More flood alerts. Nashville was lighting up. Sirens, texts from Metro, calls from the city, weather apps melting down. And somewhere around 3 a.m. Friday, I stopped caring. I shut my phone off. I stopped checking the sky. I didn’t even flinch when the thunder cracked. And when the real tornados hit? I slept through it. 

Yeah, you heard that right. I didn’t hear the tornado. I was done. 

That, my friends, is alert fatigue. And if your cybersecurity tools are vomiting alerts every 30 seconds, your team is headed there too. 

They’re Going to Sleep Through the Cyber Tornado 

Your vendors? They’ve set you up to fail. Their default alert settings are built to cover their own asses, not protect your clients. They’d rather cry wolf a thousand times than be blamed for missing the breach. So they toss the mess in your lap, and your SOC drowns in a sea of noise. 

Here’s the nightmare scenario: the real threat gets missed. Because by the time it shows up, your analysts are tuned out, exhausted, and assuming it’s just another “maybe kinda sorta” risk from that one client’s busted network. 

And then—bam. Ransomware. 

Vendors Don’t Tune Your Tools. That’s Your Job. 

If you’re running a security stack and haven’t tuned it, you’re just collecting noise. Worse—you’re conditioning your team to ignore the signal. Every unnecessary alert makes your defenses weaker. Every shrug from your techs? One step closer to sleeping through your own tornado. 

The truth: vendors don’t tune your stack. That’s your responsibility. That takes: 

  • Testing – Real scenarios. Simulated attacks.
  • Effort – Custom rules, thresholds, escalation paths.
  • Ownership – Someone has to own every alert source and every response workflow.

Dial it in. Or get drowned in the flood of false alarms. 

Train Your Team. Train Your Tools. 

This isn’t optional. Want your SOC to work? You need discipline. Tours of duty. After-action reports. Threshold reviews. Real runbooks that actually reflect your current threat model. And if your team doesn’t know what to prioritize, then they’ll either burn out—or worse, go numb. 

Alert fatigue is the slow, silent killer of security. It doesn’t look like a breach. It looks like boredom. 

Don’t Sleep Through the Cyber Tornado 

The storm is coming. Actually, scratch that—the storm never stopped. If you’re sleeping through it, it’s not because the threat is gone. It’s because your brain couldn’t take any more noise. Your SOC? Same deal. 

Fix your alerts. Give your team a chance to actually see the next attack before it hits. 

Want help? Check out our SecOps playbook on alert tuning and response.

Bonus: here’s our workshop on building tours of duty to crush alert fatigue.