Is your SOC team stuck playing MITRE ATT&CK Bingo—the never-ending pursuit of superficial coverage metrics? This checkbox mindset, often perpetuated by vendor marketing touting "100% ATT&CK coverage", leads to growing frustration among analysts buried in noisy alerts often questioning why they got into SecOps in the first place. 

Here’s the harsh truth: this checkbox mentality isn’t just downright annoying–it’s dangerous. It wastes your budget on meaningless work, exhausts your team, and gives you a false sense of control. Spoiler Alert: “coverage” doesn’t stop attacks. Precisions and relevance do. 

It’s time for a refreshing approach. Forget chasing every technique in the matrix and start focusing on what protects your business. In this post, we’ll explore the pitfalls of traditional MITRE bingo checking and introduce a new paradigm that’s driving some serious change across large Fortune 500 enterprises across Financial Services, Airlines, and Healthcare industries with our threat prioritization framework that can help your SOC go from spinning wheels to catching red team assessments. Ready to ditch the noise and get real about detection? Let’s go.

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The Problem with Traditional ATT&CK Coverage

Coverage Myths

It's a common misconception that achieving broad or complete coverage of MITRE ATT&CK equates to solid security. Vendors reinforce this notion, boasting comprehensive coverage as a key selling point. In reality, this coverage-first mindset often means casting too wide a net, leading to alert fatigue as analysts chase down low-quality alerts. Not to mention, not all techniques are relevant to every organization. If your vendor isn’t allowing you to categorize and unprioritized techniques that are not even relevant to you, you will have a miscalculated coverage score. Contextual relevance is key and even MITRE themselves advises that ATT&CK should be used to inform defenses based on your organization’s unique threat landscape, rather than a one-size-fits-all checklist.

Consider a complex technique like Process Injection (T1055). With its numerous sub-techniques and platform-specific variations, comprehensively covering T1055 would require an immense and constantly expanding set of detection rules. Multiply that effort across the entire ATT&CK matrix, and it's no surprise that analysts find themselves overwhelmed by noisy alerts lacking context or priority. Attempting to address every technique can strain your computing and human resources, leading to inadequate defenses against the most relevant attacks. Optimizing your detection rules into the right building blocks and aligning scheduling frequencies prioritized based on the organization’s risk assessment and threat intelligence is the best way to align resources and priorities. A detection strategy that reflects that and adapts to a constantly changing business and threat landscape will be best positioned to prepare for the fight.

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Real-World Impact

The consequences of the coverage-first approach are far from theoretical. Take the UnitedHealth Group breach, which resulted in a staggering $22 million ransom payment. While the company likely had extensive ATT&CK coverage on paper, hidden gaps and overloaded analysts allowed attackers to slip through undetected. This is where a threat-based modeling approach, leveraging ATT&CK as a knowledge base rather than a coverage checklist, can make a real difference.

Beyond high-profile breaches, the day-to-day impact of maintaining broad, unfocused rule sets is significant. SOC teams spend countless hours chasing false positives and triaging low-priority alerts, diverting resources from strategic threat hunting and incident response. Over time, this alert fatigue erodes analyst effectiveness and job satisfaction, leading to turnover and lost institutional knowledge.

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Rethinking Threat Detection Strategy

Asset-Centric Approach

The first step in maturing your threat detection is an asset-centric approach. Map out your critical infrastructure and data, and assess each platform's unique vulnerabilities and exploitability. By prioritizing based on business impact, you avoid expending equal effort on low-risk systems.

Crucially, evaluate the quality and richness of security event data you're collecting. Robust detections depend on having the right telemetry from across your environment.

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Threat-Based Modeling

With this foundation in place, pivot to a threat-based detection model. Instead of covering the entire ATT&CK matrix, focus on the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) most relevant to your organization.

Consider industry-specific attack patterns and active threat actors in your region. Model against ransomware gangs known to target your sector. Threat intelligence should shape custom threat campaigns that reflect your real-world risk profile.

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Building an Effective Threat Prioritization Framework with Anvilogic

How can you operationalize this strategic approach to threat modeling? A threat prioritization framework with Anvilogic provides the building blocks:

• Critical Asset Customization: Map your attack surface by tagging critical platforms, assets, and data feeds and assign priorities to align relevant detection content.
• Automated MITRE Mapping: Remove manual toil of mapping detection coverage to ATT&CK. The platform auto-aligns detection efforts to your unique environment.
• Threat Campaign Creation: Easily build custom campaigns against threat groups targeting your infrastructure based on sector, region, and more.
• Coverage Visualization: Instantaneously see detection coverage across your attack surface, highlighting gaps and inactive data feeds.
• Data-Driven Detections: Get detection quality insights and recommendations to build highly effective rules aligned to your prioritized threat scenarios.

With this threat prioritization framework, you can continuously validate coverage, uncover gaps, and adapt your detection strategy as the threat landscape evolves. It's a model for demonstrating measurable security progress to stakeholders.

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It’s Time to Break the Cycle 

We’ve all been there: SOCs chasing MITRE ATT&CK coverage. Embrace a smarter, more strategic approach to threat detection. MITRE Bingo doesn’t make you more secure; it just makes you busier. To mature your threat detection program, consider the following:

• Map Your Critical Assets: Focus on what matters most—your crown jewels and the data feeds that show activity on them. Build your detection strategy around the assets and data sources critical to your business.
• Prioritize Based on Risk: Forget covering everything. Adopt a threat-based model aligned with your business risks, so your team spends their energy on what’s most relevant.
• Build with Purpose: Use a platform that empowers you to craft targeted detections and track their performance, ensuring your efforts are effective.
• Stay Adaptive: Threats evolve, and so should your program. Continuously evaluate and adjust to stay ahead of the curve.

Adopting this proactive, strategic mindset lets you focus your SOC team on meaningful detections and get off the reactive treadmill of chasing ATT&CK percentages. So maybe it’s time to toss out the bingo card and play a smarter game. Your SOC (and your analysts) will thank you. 

You don't have to navigate this journey alone. Anvilogic's Threat Prioritization framework helps you map your attack surface, build targeted detections, and achieve threat-informed defense. Explore our feature page to learn more.