4 Outdated Habits Destroying Your SOC's MTTR in 2026
The Hacker News, Thursday, January 15th, 2026
It's 2026, yet many SOCs are still operating the way they did years ago, using tools and processes designed for a very different threat landscape. Given the growth in volumes and complexity of cyber threats, outdated practices no longer fully support analysts' needs, staggering investigations and incident response.
Below are four limiting habits that may be preventing your SOC from evolving at the pace of adversaries, and insights into what forward-looking teams are doing instead to achieve enterprise-grade incident response this year.
1. Manual Review of Suspicious Samples
Despite advances in security tools, many analysts still rely heavily on manual validation and analysis. This approach creates friction on every step, from processing samples to switching between tools and manually correlating the findings.