How to reduce false positive alerts and increase cybersecurity

False positives in cybersecurity detection tools drain resources and distract from real threats. Once CISOs understand the root causes of false positives, they can implement strategies to reduce them.

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• Karen Kent, Trusted Cyber Annex

No cybersecurity team wants to detect a malicious attack and then purposefully ignore it. But alert fatigue caused by too many false positives can lead them into that trap.

Every cybersecurity tool designed to detect attacks makes mistakes. For decades, researchers and vendors have struggled to find ways to improve threat detection accuracy without degrading performance.

Attack detection is a constant balancing act between false negatives -- when a tool fails to detect a real attack -- and false positives -- when a tool incorrectly identifies benign activity as an attack. Techniques that reduce false negatives tend to increase false positives. Get out of balance, and the false negatives can degrade security team ...