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Software Engineering vocabulary · APIs, Networking and Security

False positive

Meaning in software engineering, with examples

nounCore term

In software engineering, false positive means: An alert or test result that wrongly reports a threat or vulnerability when nothing harmful is actually there.

In Turkish: yanlış pozitif, hatalı alarm, yanlış alarm

How it is used

Very common in SOC and scanning work: analysts mark alerts as false positives and tune rules to reduce them. The opposite problem, a real attack that goes unnoticed, is a false negative and is usually more dangerous.

Example sentences

  1. It was a false positive: the backup job looked like data exfiltration.

  2. This scanner reports a lot of false positives on our Linux servers.

Common collocations

  • mark as a false positive
  • reduce false positives
  • false positive rate
  • false negative
  • alertAn automatic notification sent to engineers when a monitored value crosses a limit or something looks wrong, for example when the error rate is too high.
  • SIEMSecurity information and event management: a platform that collects logs from many systems, correlates them and raises alerts about possible attacks.
  • intrusion detection systemA tool that monitors network traffic or system activity for signs of attacks or policy violations and raises an alert when it finds them.
  • vulnerability scanAn automated check of systems, networks or applications that looks for known weaknesses, missing patches and insecure settings and lists them in a report.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: APIs, Networking and Security

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