Alert fatigue

The general security-operations phenomenon in which a reviewer facing high volumes of low-priority or routine alerts becomes desensitized and less likely to give any single alert, including a genuinely urgent one, adequate scrutiny. Illustrated in Section 4 by the Target Corporation breach; the underlying human-attention mechanism T10 names for agentic systems specifically.

The failure that occurs when a monitoring system fires so often, especially on normal variation, that the owner learns to ignore it, turning even the alerts that matter into noise. Prevented by setting thresholds where action is genuinely warranted and tiering alerts by severity.

The well-documented pattern in which people exposed to frequent false alarms begin to disregard alarms in general, including true ones. A warning system with a heavy false-alarm burden can produce alert fatigue and thereby cause the very missed cases it was meant to prevent.

The condition in which a team receives so many low-value or poorly targeted quality alerts that it begins to deprioritize alerts as a category, increasing the risk that a genuinely important alert is dismissed along with the noise.

The tendency to stop reading or acting on notifications once they arrive too frequently to feel meaningful, a risk when a transaction alert threshold is set too low relative to a person's ordinary spending.