200-201 Security Monitoring Practice Question
An analyst is tuning Snort IDS rules and wants to reduce false positives. Which TWO rule options can be adjusted to decrease sensitivity?
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
✓
Add a 'suppress' rule to ignore traffic from known benign IPs
Setting a higher threshold (e.g., detection_filter) reduces alerts for low-frequency events. Enabling 'suppress' can ignore specific sources or destinations that generate false positives.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Change the rule action from 'alert' to 'drop'
Why it's wrong here
This changes response but not sensitivity.
- ✓
Add a 'suppress' rule to ignore traffic from known benign IPs
Why this is correct
Suppression prevents alerts from trusted sources.
- ✗
Change protocol from TCP to UDP
Why it's wrong here
This changes the matching criteria but not necessarily reduce false positives.
- ✗
Increase the rule priority from low to high
Why it's wrong here
Priority affects alerting but not sensitivity; higher priority may increase alerts.
- ✓
Use the 'detection_filter' to require a certain number of matches within a time window
Why this is correct
This reduces alerts for isolated events that are likely false positives.
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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.