Cybersecurity Wake-Up Call: The Hidden Dangers Lurking in “Low-Risk” Alerts

In a shocking revelation that’s sending ripples through the cybersecurity community, new research from AI-powered Security Operations Center (SOC) platform Intezer has uncovered a disturbing truth: the alerts most security teams dismiss as “low-severity” are actually hiding serious threats that could compromise entire enterprise networks.

The Silent Epidemic: When “Low Risk” Becomes High Stakes

Imagine this scenario: Your security team receives hundreds of thousands of alerts annually. Following established protocols, they focus on the high-severity ones while dismissing the majority as low-risk. After all, that’s what the system labels them, right?

Wrong.

According to Intezer’s comprehensive analysis of more than 25 million security alerts across live enterprise environments, nearly one percent of confirmed incidents originated from alerts initially labeled as low-severity. At endpoints specifically, that figure jumps to almost two percent.

While these percentages might seem negligible at first glance, they represent a staggering reality for the average enterprise. For organizations generating hundreds of thousands of alerts annually, this translates to approximately 50 real, active threats per year that never receive investigation. Fifty potential cyber breaches that slip through the cracks because they were mislabeled as insignificant.

The False Sense of Security

“Security teams have normalized the idea that some risk must be accepted because it is impossible to investigate everything,” explains Itai Tevet, CEO and co-founder of Intezer. “Our research shows that this acceptance is increasingly misaligned with how modern attacks unfold. When genuine threats consistently emerge from alerts we have trained ourselves to ignore, the definition of acceptable risk needs to be reexamined.”

This normalization of risk represents a fundamental flaw in how organizations approach cybersecurity. The traditional triage model—prioritizing high-severity alerts while deprioritizing or ignoring low-severity ones—assumes that the classification system is accurate and that threats follow predictable patterns. Modern attackers have evolved far beyond these assumptions.

Endpoint Security: Not as Secure as You Think

The research reveals particularly troubling findings regarding endpoint protection. Over half of all endpoint alerts were not automatically mitigated by their endpoint protection solutions. Even more concerning, of these non-mitigated alerts, almost nine percent were confirmed as malicious.

Perhaps most alarming is the discovery that 1.6 percent of alerts that underwent live forensic endpoint scanning were found to have active compromise, even though endpoint security tools indicated the threat had been mitigated. This means that in these cases, the very tools designed to protect systems were providing false reassurance while active threats continued to operate undetected.

The Evolution of Phishing: Beyond Attachments

Phishing attacks have undergone a dramatic transformation, evolving from the days of suspicious attachments to more sophisticated methods that exploit trust in legitimate services. The research found that fewer than six percent of malicious phishing emails contained attachments. Instead, attackers have shifted their focus to links, carefully crafted language, and abuse of legitimate services.

Modern phishing campaigns now leverage code sandboxes, cloud file sharing platforms, and even CAPTCHA mechanisms to evade detection. By hiding malicious content behind trusted services and using social engineering techniques that exploit human psychology, these attacks bypass traditional email security filters that focus primarily on attachment-based threats.

Cloud Misconfigurations: The Persistent Achilles’ Heel

Despite years of warnings and countless best practice guidelines, cloud misconfigurations remain a widespread and persistent problem. The majority of cloud posture findings involve legacy or default configurations, particularly in Amazon S3 environments. Common issues include missing encryption, weak access controls, and lack of logging.

These misconfigurations create what security professionals call “shadow attack surfaces”—vulnerabilities that exist not because of sophisticated attacks, but because of basic security hygiene failures. In an era where cloud infrastructure forms the backbone of most enterprise operations, these misconfigurations represent low-hanging fruit for attackers.

The AI Factor: Scaling Forensic Analysis

What makes this research particularly significant is the role of artificial intelligence in uncovering these hidden threats. Traditional security operations rely heavily on human analysts to investigate alerts, but the volume of alerts generated by modern security tools far exceeds human capacity. This creates the perfect conditions for threats to hide in plain sight.

AI-driven forensic analysis changes this equation by operating at enterprise scale, able to investigate every alert regardless of its initial severity classification. This capability reveals patterns and threats that would otherwise remain invisible to human analysts constrained by time and resources.

Rethinking “Acceptable Risk”

The findings from Intezer’s research force a fundamental reconsideration of what constitutes “acceptable risk” in enterprise cybersecurity. The traditional approach of accepting some level of risk because comprehensive investigation is impossible may no longer be justifiable when AI tools can eliminate that constraint.

This shift represents more than just a technological upgrade—it’s a philosophical change in how organizations approach security. Instead of accepting that some threats will inevitably slip through, organizations can now aspire to investigate every alert, ensuring that no threat, regardless of how it’s initially classified, goes unnoticed.

The Path Forward

For CISOs and security leaders, these findings present both a challenge and an opportunity. The challenge is acknowledging that current security practices may be leaving organizations vulnerable to threats hiding in low-severity alerts. The opportunity is leveraging AI-powered tools to eliminate this blind spot and achieve a level of security coverage that was previously impossible.

The research also highlights the need for continuous reassessment of security tool configurations and alert classification systems. If legitimate threats are consistently emerging from low-severity alerts, it suggests that the criteria used to classify alerts may need recalibration.

A Call to Action

As cyber threats continue to evolve in sophistication and scale, the margin for error in security operations continues to shrink. The discovery that potentially 50 serious threats per year are being ignored in a typical enterprise should serve as a wake-up call for organizations to reassess their security postures.

The question is no longer whether organizations can afford to investigate every alert, but whether they can afford not to. In an era where AI makes comprehensive investigation possible, accepting hidden threats as “acceptable risk” may be the riskiest decision of all.

The full report is available from the Intezer site, and a webinar presenting the findings will be held on February 4th at 12 noon ET, offering security professionals an opportunity to dive deeper into these critical findings and explore strategies for addressing this hidden threat landscape.

Tags: cybersecurity, AI security, threat detection, low-severity alerts, endpoint protection, phishing evolution, cloud security, enterprise risk, security operations, SOC, Intezer research, acceptable risk, forensic analysis, cyber threats, security blind spots, modern attacks, cloud misconfigurations, email security, AI SOC platform, security investigation

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