How to Maintain Fast and Fatigue-Free Alert Triage with Threat Intelligence
Efficient alert triage, supported by robust threat intelligence, ensures that organizations stay ahead of adversaries while maintaining analyst productivity and morale. We shall see how it works on the example of ANY.RUN’s Threat Intelligence Lookup.
Why Triage is the Key to Efficiency
For SOCs, triage ensures that internal teams focus on high-priority incidents that could compromise critical systems or data. MSSPs, managing multiple clients, rely on triage to allocate resources efficiently across diverse environments, ensuring timely responses tailored to each client’s needs.
The triage process acts as the gateway between detection and action — the critical juncture where security alerts either trigger appropriate defensive measures or fade into background noise.
Challenges and Problems of Alert Triage
Alert triage is fraught with challenges that compromise its effectiveness in many organizations.
These obstacles create inefficiencies, delay responses, and increase organizational risk.
Speed as a Critical Key Performance Indicator
Speed in alert triage, measured by metrics like Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) and Mean Time to Respond (MTTR), is a critical KPI for SOCs and MSSPs. Rapid triage minimizes the window of opportunity for attackers, reducing potential damage from breaches, data loss, or system downtime. For businesses, fast triage aligns with key objectives:
Organizations with efficient triage processes can handle larger volumes of security data without proportionally increasing staff, improving operational efficiency and ROI on security investments.
ANY.RUN’s Threat Intelligence Lookup: A Comprehensive Solution
ANY.RUN’s Threat Intelligence Lookup addresses both the speed and fatigue challenges by providing rapid, comprehensive threat context for indicators like files, URLs, domains, and IP addresses, and enabling teams to make informed decisions quickly. Besides basic IOCs, this data contains attack and behavioral indicators including:
The data is derived from investigations of real-world cyberattacks on over 15,000 companies using ANY.RUN’s services.
When analysts encounter suspicious artifacts during triage, they can quickly query the service to obtain detailed information about the threat. This eliminates the time-consuming process of manually researching threats across multiple sources.
TI Lookup Use Cases: Faster and Smarter Alert Triage
Instead of spending valuable time manually investigating suspicious artifacts, analysts can focus on higher-level analysis and decision-making. Here are a couple of examples.
1. Artifact Quick Check
A suspicious IP spotted in network connections can be checked against TI Lookup’s vast indicator database in a matter of seconds.
The IP address is exposed as malicious and a part of Quasar RAT inventory. It has been detected in recent malware samples, so it is an indicator of an actual threat.
2. Process Investigation
Suppose an analyst notices a legitimate utility like certutil.exe is used for retrieving content from an external URL. All they have to do is copy a snippet of command line contents and paste it into TI Lookup search bar with the CommandLine search parameter:
Switching to the Analyses tab of the search results, the analyst observes a selection of malware samples that performed this command during their execution chain. Now he knows that this behavior is typical for Glupteba trojan acting as a loader. Each sample analysis can be researched in depth and used for collecting IOCs.
3. Registry Change Understanding
Could it be okay if an app changes Windows registry key \\CurrentVersion\\Run responsible for default autoruns at system startup, by adding a command that initiates a script execution chain via mshta.exe using built-in VBScript? Query TI Lookup using RegistryKey and RegistryValue search parameters:
As we can notice looking at the found sandbox analyses, such registry modification is often associated with malware evasion and persistence techniques, and is typical for XWorm RAT.
4. Mutex detection
When a new malware emerges, the available intelligence on it can be scarce. Nitrogen ransomware became notorious for targeting the valuable and vulnerable financial sector back in mid-2024. For months, a single research report was the source of public data on this strain. It provided analysts with two IOCs and two IOBs, one of the formers was a mutex.
Before encrypting files, Nitrogen creates a unique mutex (nvxkjcv7yxctvgsdfjhv6esdvsx) to ensure only one instance of the ransomware runs at a time. The mutex can be used for Nitrogen detection, and searching for it via Threat Intelligence Lookup delivers Nitrogen samples detonated in the Interactive Sandbox.
Each sample can be explored to enrich the understanding of the threat and gather additional indicators not featured in public research.
5. Payload recognition
File hashes as unique digital fingerprints of a particular file are popular indicators of compromise. TI Lookup supports md5, sha256 and sha1 search parameters, but also allows to use a file name as a query.
The lookup results show that a certain file name pattern can emerge in both malicious and benign samples: phishing kit campaigns often use filenames typical for popular documentation formats.
We can observe several samples of phishing attacks using the file with such name pattern in the Interactive Sandbox:
File name search can help understand the general mechanics of phishkit attacks and see a broader picture of emerging threats.
Fast, Fatigue-Free Alert Triage with Threat Intelligence
ANY.RUN’s Threat Intelligence Lookup fuels this strategy by providing immediate, context-rich insights into suspicious artifacts and transforming reactive, manual investigations into proactive, informed decision-making. This translates into tangible business values:
About ANY.RUN
Over 500,000 cybersecurity professionals and 15,000+ companies in finance, manufacturing, healthcare, and other sectors rely on ANY.RUN. Our services streamline malware and phishing investigations for organizations worldwide.
Information Security & Compliance Manager | CISSP, CISA, ISO27001
1wThis is a good overview of how TI Lookup can accelerate triage by enriching IOCs with valuable context. However, I believe it's important to recognize that while this improves lookup efficiency, it doesn't necessarily translate into true fatigue reduction for analysts. Fatigue in SOC environments is primarily driven by alert overload, repetitive manual tasks, and cognitive stress—not just slow access to threat context. TI Lookup is a helpful tool in the analyst’s workflow, but without upstream noise reduction, risk-based prioritization, or automation of low-confidence alerts, the overall fatigue issue still remains. A more fatigue-resilient approach would combine enrichment like TI Lookup with automated correlation, AI-assisted suppression, and a feedback loop that learns from analyst actions to reduce future triage load. Still, TI Lookup certainly adds value as a tactical enabler — especially when paired with broader SOC process optimizations.