TL;TR
Defenders are trapped in a reactive loop of triaging millions of alerts (often 50-90% false positives), while attackers spend weeks or months in a “quiet build” phase. During this time, they register domains, warm up IP addresses, and establish Command-and-Control (C2) infrastructure that is statistically indistinguishable from legitimate business traffic. To break this cycle, organizations must shift from alert-centric triaging to infrastructure-aware proactive defense; a core specialty of Saptang Labs.
The Tale of Two Mornings
Imagine two different scenes playing out at 3:00 AM on a Tuesday.
In one city, a Tier-1 SOC analyst sits under the hum of fluorescent lights, staring at a dashboard flashing red. It is the fifth “Suspicious PowerShell Execution” alert of the hour. Four were legitimate administrative scripts. This one looks the same, but the analyst’s eyes are heavy. They spend twenty minutes digging through logs, only to find it was a scheduled task from the IT department’s new patch management tool. They close the ticket, sigh, and move to the next of the 400 pending alerts.
In another city, a threat actor is not looking at a dashboard. They are looking at a spreadsheet of freshly registered domains. They aren’t attacking anyone yet. They are busy “aging” their infrastructure. They are sending benign traffic through a series of proxy servers to build a reputation of legitimacy with global ISP filters. They are setting up a “silent” command center. They haven’t triggered a single alert on any target’s radar because, technically, they haven’t touched a target yet.
This is the fundamental asymmetry of modern cybersecurity: Defenders are chasing the symptoms of past actions, while attackers are engineering the foundations of future ones.
The cybersecurity industry has a noise problem. Modern enterprises deploy dozens of security tools—EDR, NDR, SIEM, CASB—each generating its own stream of data. Studies from late 2024 and early 2025 indicate that the average SOC receives thousands of alerts daily, with some reports showing that up to 30% of critical alerts go uninvestigated due to sheer volume.
When we talk about “Alert Fatigue,” we often treat it as a human resource issue. But it is actually a strategic vulnerability. While your best minds are occupied with the “Low-Priority” noise of a misconfigured API, the adversary is leveraging automation to scan 230 million unique targets for the one plaintext secret you left in a GitHub repository.
Key Pain Points in Defender Operations:
While we obsess over “Detections,” the sophisticated attacker obsesses over “Infrastructure.” Building attack infrastructure is an exercise in business logic.
To launch a successful campaign in 2025, an attacker needs:
By the time the first malicious packet hits your firewall, the attacker has already spent weeks “living in the shadows” of the open internet. They aren’t just hackers; they are architects.
The traditional SOC model relies on Indicators of Compromise (IoCs)—file hashes, known bad IPs, and specific domains. The problem? These are at the bottom of the “Pyramid of Pain.” They are incredibly easy for an attacker to change.
If you block an IP, the attacker flips a switch and gets a new one. If you block a hash, they recompile their malware. They are moving at the speed of cloud automation, while we are moving at the speed of human triage.
To truly defend, we must move toward Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures (TTPs) and, more importantly, Infrastructure Intelligence. We need to know not just that an IP is “bad,” but that it belongs to a cluster of servers recently spun up by a known ransomware affiliate.
How do we break the cycle? The answer lies in Proactive Visibility. If you can see the attacker building their house, you don’t have to wait for them to break into yours. This requires a transition from “Alert Management” to “Threat Surface Monitoring.”
Strategic Shifts for 2025:
Ans: Not necessarily. It is a symptom of relying on signature-based detection and siloed tools. Moving toward a unified, intelligence-driven platform can reduce noise by up to 80% through correlation and automated suppression of known-benign patterns.
2. How do attackers “age” their infrastructure?
Ans: Attackers register domains and host “dummy” websites that look like legitimate blogs or small businesses. They let these sit for months, occasionally generating traffic, so that when the attack starts, security filters see a “trusted” domain rather than a “newly registered” one.
3. What is the “Pyramid of Pain” in cybersecurity?
Ans: It’sa concept that ranks indicators by how much “pain” it causes an attacker when a defender blocks them. Values like IP addresses and hashes are at the bottom (easy to change). TTPs (how they behave) are at the top and are the hardest for attackers to modify.
4. Why are non-human identities (NHIs) a growing risk?
Ans: Automated systems and APIsdon’t get tired and don’t use MFA. Attackers target these because they often have high-level permissions and rarely trigger the same “unusual login” alerts that a human user would.
The gap between the attacker’s infrastructure and the defender’s alert queue is where breaches happen. As long as we are satisfied with “chasing the red,” we will always be one step behind. The future of security isn’t about better alerts; it’s about better sight.
At Saptang Labs, we believe in moving the battlefield. We don’t just wait for the alert to hit your SIEM; we monitor the vast expanses of the digital wild—mobile, web, and endpoints—to identify the “quiet build” of the adversary. Our approach uses Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and advanced data crawling to connect the dots between seemingly unrelated indicators, giving you the visibility to stop an attack while it’s still in the construction phase.
If you are tired of the endless alert loop and want to see the infrastructure being built against you before it’s too late, it’s time to rethink your strategy.
Ready to see what’s happening outside your perimeter? Explore how we turn global threat data into proactive defense at saptanglabs.com.
You may also find this insight helpful: From Alert Fatigue to Action: Why CISOs Need Unified External Visibility