Understanding Triage in Cybersecurity

Triage in cybersecurity is an important phase of incident response. Like emergency room triage, it’s about quickly understanding which threats matter most and which can wait. Without it, teams risk spending time on false positives while real threats escalate, all the while fostering a culture of burnout.

Breaches don’t necessarily arrive with labels, and a triage process in incident response can help teams cut through the noise, increase accuracy, respond to the most critical threats, and reduce breach impact.

Why Triage Matters

Security teams often face alert overload. Endpoint detection and response (EDR) platforms, security information and event management (SIEM) tools, threat intelligence feeds, and internal logs produce a plethora of daily signals. Without structured triage, even the best teams can struggle to identify true risk.

Failure to triage effectively can result in:

• Delayed incident response

• Missed breaches due to alert fatigue

• Burnout among security analysts

• Excessive time chasing low-risk anomalies

Faster triage generally reduces downstream risk across the entire digital supply chain, as hackers have less time to exploit your security gaps.

The Core Steps of a Triage Process

Triage must be structured, repeatable, and fast. The process typically includes five core stages:

1. Detection Intake

Gather alerts from all relevant sources:

• EDR platforms

• Network detection systems

• External threat intelligence feeds

• Breach notifications, including from vendors

2. Initial Classification

Classify alerts into defined buckets, such as malware, unauthorized access, phishing, or misconfigurations. Using standard tags and categories to sort input can reduce uncertainty when seconds count. Analysts also assess for context and potential errors, such as false positives.

3. Severity Scoring

Assess severity based on:

• System criticality

• Data sensitivity

• Exploitability (such as known CVEs or malware indicators)

• Level of access involved

4. Business Impact Evaluation

Consider the broader implications of the alert. This step helps shift triage from technical to strategic decision-making:

• Does it impact core systems or customer-facing services?

• Could it disrupt regulatory reporting or revenue?

• Are vendors or partners implicated?

5. Prioritization and Handoff

Escalate based on the inputs collected during the triage process. Route the alert to the appropriate team, whether it’s incident response, legal, privacy, or communications. High-priority and critical cases should trigger escalation workflows immediately.

Common Pitfalls That Undermine Triage

Even experienced SOC teams can fall into traps that weaken triage:

• Alert fatigue: Too many false positives can desensitize analysts and reduce overall team impact on reducing potential breach impact

• Overreliance on automation: While automation can help increase the efficiency of incident response, machines can miss nuance without human context

• Limited threat intelligence: Lacking insight into known attacker behavior can lead to misclassification or misunderstanding of the broader picture

Effective triage requires the right balance between automation and expert review.

Triage in Third-Party Breach Scenarios

Triage can become more complex during third-party incidents. These alerts often emerge indirectly, such as through:

• Anomalous behavior from a vendor’s IP range

• Breach notifications from a supplier

• Abnormal login attempts tied to partner workflows

SecurityScorecard’s Supply Chain Detection and Response (SCDR) enriches these signals with context: Vendor breach history, changes in cyber hygiene over time, a malware information sharing platform, and more. This helps teams quickly assess whether a partner breach poses direct risk to the business.

Third-party breaches don’t happen in a vacuum either.

• 35.5% of all breaches now originate with third parties, according to SecurityScorecard’s 2025 Third-Party Breach Report.
• The frequency of this is only increasing—that statistic is up over 6% from the previous year.

As third-party breaches increasingly cause a cascade of incidents, any organizations that works with even one third party should create incident response plans for addressing third-party breaches. This can include conducting risk assessments of vendors, outlining communications protocols in case of an incident, and creating plans on how your organization will detect, classify, contain, and eradicate threats stemming from third parties.

How to Improve Triage Operations

Triage maturity is a key predictor of response success. To strengthen your process:

• Create playbooks for frequent incident types (such as phishing, malware, third-party breaches)

• Use security ratings to prioritize threats from high-risk vendors

• Build a shared triage queue across teams

• Integrate triage tools with threat intelligence feeds for enrichment

• Automate initial alert scoring, but include human decision-making for escalation

• Conduct post-incident reviews to improve over time

Organizations that embed triage into alert flows can work to reduce both mean time to detection (MTTD) and mean time to response (MTTR) and other key performance indicators in cybersecurity. By embedding smart triage practices, security teams can respond to issues in priority order, can respond faster, and reduce breach impact.

Leverage solutions like SecurityScorecard’s managed service for Supply Chain Detection and Response (SCDR), MAX, to contextualize threats and integrate with SOC workflows for real-time incident response.

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