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Training Camp • Cybersecurity Glossary
A false positive flags benign activity as malicious, fueling alert fatigue; tuning rules and adding context reduces these erroneous detections.
False Positive Definition: A false positive flags benign activity as malicious, fueling alert fatigue; tuning rules and adding context reduces these erroneous detections.
A false positive is a security detection that incorrectly classifies benign activity as malicious, such as an intrusion detection system flagging normal traffic as an attack. High false-positive rates contribute to alert fatigue, waste analyst time, and can cause real threats to be overlooked. Tuning detection rules, applying allowlists, and adding context through correlation help reduce false positives without raising the false-negative rate.
False Positive is one of the topics you'll master in the CySA+ Boot Camp.
CySA+ Boot Camp →