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Global Accelerated Learning • Est. 1999
Glossary Term True Positive

Training Camp • Cybersecurity Glossary

What is True Positive?

True positive: a security alert that correctly detects genuine malicious activity, contrasted with false positives and false negatives in detection tuning.

Glossary > Security Operations > True Positive

Understanding True Positive

A true positive is a security alert that correctly identifies genuine malicious or anomalous activity, representing an accurate detection by a control such as an IDS, SIEM, or EDR platform. It contrasts with a false positive, which flags benign activity as malicious, and a false negative, which fails to detect a real threat. Maximizing true positives while minimizing false positives is a central goal in tuning detection systems and measuring their effectiveness.

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