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Mitigating False Positives

Mitigating False Positives

Protecting data has become an arduous task. Companies are so focused on protecting data from a breach that often times IT departments dedicate enormous amounts of time to mitigating false positive attacks. It is a delicate balancing act of keeping data secure while keeping the IT department focused on other priorities.

False positives are distracting to teams and pulls attention from legitimate security concerns.

Here are a few tips to help mitigate false positive:

  • Have an effective strategy on how to efficiently handle security threats. This includes actively looking for threats instead of letting the threats always come through as an alert.
  • When writing rules for identifying potential anomalies and developing alerts, make sure to consider all departments and how they handle information. The more precise the rules are, the better they work at reducing false positive threats.
  • Keep the rules silent until they have been tested and come back with no false positives.
  • Prioritize alerts by potential damage. Each event comes with a level of risk. If you have senior staff addressing all alerts as they come in equally, their time is not being well managed. Have senior staff address high-risk events while others mitigate the rest.
  • Always work to fine-tune rules. Cyber threats are constantly changing; make sure that rules are reviewed periodically to improve security measures and to minimize false positives.

There is no way to completely eliminate false positives, but by really examining rules and threats, false positives can be minimized.  

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