Incident Triage

Short Definition

Incident triage is the first step in evaluating an alert to determine whether it is a real threat, its severity, and what the immediate response should be.

Deep Technical Explanation

Triage prevents analysts from wasting time on noise and false alarms. During triage, L1 analysts determine:

whether the alert is real or false
its urgency
potential business impact
required action
Which team should handle it

Triage involves checking logs, alerts, user activity, device behavior, geolocation patterns, threat intelligence, and environment context. Quality triage dramatically reduces dwell time and speeds up incident response.

Incident triage is typically supported by tools such as:

SIEM platforms like Splunk, Elastic, Microsoft Sentinel, IBM QRadar, and Google Chronicle for log correlation and alert generation,
as well as EDR platforms such as CrowdStrike Falcon, SentinelOne, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, and Sophos Intercept X for endpoint telemetry and behavioral insights.
Triage also relies on SOAR tools, including Cortex XSOAR, Splunk SOAR, and Sentinel’s automation features.
along with threat intelligence platforms like Recorded Future, VirusTotal, MISP, and ThreatConnect for enrichment.
Additional validation is performed using network and log analysis tools like Zeek, Suricata, Wireshark,
and NetFlow analyzers, combined with cloud native security tools such as AWS GuardDuty, Azure Security Center, and Google Security Command Center,
plus email and identity security platforms, including Proofpoint, Mimecast, Okta, and Duo Security.