A security event is a change in the everyday operations of a network or information technology service indicating that a security policy may have been violated or a security safeguard may have failed. In a computing context, events include any identifiable occurrence that has significance for system hardware or software. Security events are those that may have significance to the security of systems or data.
According to a report from threat detection vendor Damballa, organizations surveyed had an average of 10,000 security events a day. Security products such as antivirus software can reduce the number of security events and many incidence response processes can be automated to make the workload more manageable.