Understanding False Positives in Cybersecurity

False positives in cybersecurity are when a company’s cybersecurity system identifies a suspicious activity or locates a potential threat that doesn’t actually exist. This could be from incorrectly flagging a file as containing malware or categorizing an email as unsafe. False positives often waste company resources as your IT department has to spend time analyzing the threat and realizing that it was a false alarm.

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Causes of False Positives

False positives in cybersecurity can occur due to a number of different reasons. Most of the time, these come down to the company’s security settings, with misconfigurations or a lack of context often translating into false positives.

Here is a list of common reasons that false positives occur:

Sensitive Security Settings: Overly sensitive security controls may err on the side of caution when presented with a file or piece of code that could potentially be malicious. If you have several overly sensitive security controls, your business will likely experience a higher proportion of false positives.
Context-Dependent Security Tools: Some forms of static analysis will analyze the underlying code of a program to detect potential threats. While this is an effective strategy, especially when used in intrusion detection, it’s important to note that something may only be malicious in certain contexts. There are context-dependent elements of cybersecurity that need to be taken into account and accommodated to avoid false positives. Failure to do so will generate security issues.
Signature-Based Detection: Many security tools utilize signature-based threat detection software that locates files that exhibit certain signatures. If the base software of these programs is misconfigured, they can easily become over-aggressive, identifying even common signals in normal files and flagging them as potentially dangerous.

Impact of False Positives

While some false positives are bound to happen in even a well-structured cybersecurity infrastructure, too many will quickly become a major problem for security teams. Here are some of the most common impacts of false positives:

Wasted time: When a security alert occurs, your IT team will have to spend their time attending to that report, dissecting it to find the root cause, and implementing strategies to ensure it is solved or remedied. If you have a false positive, then your team still has to spend the same amount of time with the report, only to find that all of that time was wasted.
Alert fatigue: When a security alert arises, your team has to respond. If they, time and time again, come across false positives, they will normally become less responsive, as they get used to the reports not really mattering. When a real threat does arrive, speed is essential to preventing major breaches from occurring. Alert fatigue can reduce your response time and leave your organization in a worse situation.
Disruptions: Some false positive reports will instantly trigger some automated cybersecurity defenses. For example, your system might begin to isolate certain parts of your server network, as this will prevent any real threats from spreading. While this is useful, it could also create blockages that prevent employees from getting their work done. If false positives cause this frequently, then you could suffer from major productivity disruptions.

Types of False Positives

There are several different types of false positives that businesses may encounter:

Anomalies: These are simple anomalous readings that are far from the normal and therefore create alerts.
Endpoint Protection Control Alerts: An endpoint may accidentally produce a cybersecurity report that your team has to attend to. Especially for devices that are not updated, this is a common reason for false positives.
Miscategorizations: This form of false positive is especially present in email security, where a non-threatening email will be accidentally flagged as potentially containing malware.
Authentication Failures: Authentication failures will reject a customer’s or an employee’s ID cards or a picture of their face by accident, needing a human agent to review their case.

Best Practices for Reducing False Positives

There are several strategies that you can implement to manage false positives and reduce the likelihood of them occurring:

Fine-Tune Security Controls: Within your existing cybersecurity architecture, you can begin to fine-tune your systems to make them more specific. A more specific security tool configuration will reduce its breadth, only then preventing a more specific type of threat. This is a useful step to take if you often get misconfiguration errors. Learn from them and then adjust your controls to make them more accurate.
Patch Cyber Defenses Continuously: Implementing newer versions of cybersecurity tools and systems will help overcome any known causes of false positives that developers have found since the last patch.
Streamline the Response Process: One of the ways in which a false positive can greatly slow down an IT team is if they take a long time to respond to every single threat. By developing a threat response framework and implementing it into your organization, you can accelerate threat response. With this in place, your team can speedily move through alerts and respond to them, blasting through false positives without having to take a significant portion of their days.

By combining these approaches, enterprises are able to reduce the number of false positives in cybersecurity that occur while also decreasing their severity.

Maximize Security with Check Point

Constantly improving your cybersecurity defenses, adjusting their configurations, and discovering the root cause of false positives will help you decrease their prevalence in your organization. Decreasing the frequency of false positives can save your IT administrators time and ensure they respond to real threats in a timely manner.

With Check Point Infinity, your business will be able to leverage the power of AI to enhance enterprise security management. With Infinity, you can reduce the risk of misconfigurations and build an effective response against a number of common attack vectors. Continuous monitoring will prepare your business to manage high cybersecurity workloads with ease. Get started today by booking a demo.