# What is a False Positive?

> A false positive is a security finding that incorrectly indicates that a defined malicious condition, policy violation or vulnerability is present.

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## Content

The important question is not simply whether an alert led to an incident; it is whether the detector’s stated claim was wrong. A scanner reporting a vulnerability that does not exist and an analytic classifying ordinary activity as credential theft are false positives.

An alert can also be accurate without representing hostile activity. For example, a rule may correctly detect attack-like commands during an authorized penetration test. Many teams call this a benign positive: the observed behavior and detection logic were real, but the context made the activity permitted or harmless. Disposition labels vary among organizations, so each label should have a documented meaning.

### Key points

- **Classification test:** State what the detector claims, verify the underlying evidence, then separately assess authorization, intent, impact, and response need.
- **Common causes:** Broad thresholds, missing context, inaccurate asset or identity data, parsing errors, environmental changes, and assumptions that no longer hold.
- **Useful feedback:** Record why the finding was closed and feed recurring patterns into rule tuning, enrichment, allowlist governance, or upstream data fixes.
- **Important limitation:** A low false-positive rate does not prove that detection is effective. A rule can stay quiet because it is too narrow, receives incomplete telemetry or misses the activity entirely.

### Related terms

[Alert triage](<https://yellowcube.eu/glossary/alert-triage/>) · [Detection engineering](<https://yellowcube.eu/glossary/detection-engineering/>) · [False negative](<https://yellowcube.eu/glossary/false-negative/>) · [Security telemetry](<https://yellowcube.eu/glossary/security-telemetry/>)

### Sources

[NIST glossary: false positive](https://csrc.nist.gov/glossary/term/False_Positive) · [NIST SP 800-94](https://csrc.nist.gov/pubs/sp/800/94/final)

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