Your SOC gets too many false positive alerts. How would you reduce alert fatigue without missing real attacks?
What the interviewer wants to hear
- Measure which rules create the most noise
- Tune with specific exclusions and context, not by disabling
- Add risk-based scoring or correlation
- Automate enrichment and repeated steps with SOAR
- Review changes and test that detections still fire
Model answer
First I measure. I look at which rules produce the most alerts and their true positive rate, because usually a few rules create most of the noise. For each noisy rule I find the cause and tune it narrowly, for example excluding a known backup service account on specific hosts, instead of disabling the whole rule or excluding a full subnet. I add context such as asset criticality and user risk, and move weak signals into risk-based alerting, so one low-risk event adds a score and only several related events create an alert. SOAR playbooks can automate enrichment, like IP reputation and user lookups, so analysts spend less time per alert. Every exclusion is documented and reviewed, and I re-test the detection with tools like Atomic Red Team to make sure it still fires on real attacks.
Can you answer it under time pressure?
Take a timed medium round and get scored on every answer.
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