Runtime incident classification: are your alerts actionable enough?

TL;DR: Runtime incident classification turns flat severity lists into response decisions by separating active threats, attempted attacks, review cases, and informational events, according to ARMO. The shift matters because SOCs and platform teams can route urgent incidents differently from blocked probes, which is a practical antidote to alert fatigue.

NHIMG editorial — based on content published by ARMO: Runtime Incident Classification: Turning a Noisy Alert List Into a Triage Decision

By the numbers:

• 72% of organisations have experienced or suspect they have experienced a breach of non-human identities, with 46% confirmed and 26% suspected.
• Only 5.7% of organisations have full visibility into their service accounts.
• 97% of NHIs carry excessive privileges, increasing unauthorised access and broadening the attack surface.

Questions worth separating out

Q: What breaks when runtime incidents are sorted only by severity?

A: Severity-only triage collapses active compromise, blocked probes, and benign operational activity into the same queue.

Q: Why do service-account tokens make runtime alerts harder to triage?

A: Because tokens turn a process alert into an identity event.

Q: How do security teams know if runtime classification is working?

A: Look for lower paging volume without slower containment.

Practitioner guidance

• Define response policies by incident class Map Active Threat to immediate containment, Attempted Attack to verification and hardening, Review Required to analyst review, and Informational to audit retention.
• Correlate runtime alerts with identity activity Require cloud identity, token, and service-account context before escalating process alerts.
• Preserve analyst overrides with full provenance Record the original class, the new label, the reason, the analyst, and the timestamp whenever a human reclassifies an incident.

What's in the full article

ARMO's full blog covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:

• The exact four-label classification logic and the plain-language reasoning attached to each runtime incident.
• Policy examples showing how Active Threat, Attempted Attack, Review Required, and Informational route to different response actions.
• The full incident history model for analyst overrides, including labels, reasons, and timestamps.
• Story-tab views that connect the classification with the attack timeline and supporting context.

👉 Read ARMO's blog on runtime incident classification and triage decisions →

Runtime incident classification: are your alerts actionable enough?

Explore further

View Full Forum →  |  NHI Foundation Course →