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200-201 Practice Question: A company uses Cisco Firepower NGFW with…
A company uses Cisco Firepower NGFW with intrusion prevention. The security team notices that some legitimate traffic is being blocked by the IPS, causing application outages. The analyst reviews the IPS signature events and finds false positives. What is the best approach to handle this without reducing security posture?
⚠ Common exam trap
Cisco often tests the misconception that disabling or lowering the severity of a false-positive signature is an acceptable quick fix, but the correct approach is to use custom rule exclusions to preserve detection for true positives.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Create a custom rule to exclude the affected traffic based on source/destination, while monitoring the signature for true positives.
It allows the security team to selectively exclude only the specific legitimate traffic causing false positives, using source/destination criteria in a custom rule, while keeping the IPS signature active for all other traffic. This approach maintains the overall security posture by still detecting true positives from the same signature against other traffic flows. Disabling or lowering the signature's severity would globally reduce detection capability, and updating the database may not address a signature that is inherently too broad for the environment.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Lower the severity of the signature to informational.
Why it's wrong here
Doesn't prevent blocking.
- ✗
Disable the IPS signature that is causing the false positives.
Why it's wrong here
Disabling reduces security.
- ✓
Create a custom rule to exclude the affected traffic based on source/destination, while monitoring the signature for true positives.
Why this is correct
Allows traffic while enabling detection.
- ✗
Update the IPS signature database to the latest version.
Why it's wrong here
May not fix false positive for that specific traffic.
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JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This 200-201 practice question is part of Courseiva's free Cisco certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the 200-201 exam.