easyMultiple Choice
CRISC Practice Question: During a control monitoring review, it is…
During a control monitoring review, it is discovered that a detective control has a high false positive rate. What is the MOST significant impact of this issue?
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
✓
Increased risk of missing actual security incidents.
A high false positive rate in a detective control leads to alert fatigue, where security personnel may ignore or dismiss alerts, increasing the risk that actual security incidents are missed. Option A is a consequence but not the most significant. Option C may occur but is secondary. Option D is an operational impact but does not directly increase risk.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
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Loss of confidence in the control by management.
Why it's wrong here
Management confidence does erode, but that is a symptom of the underlying failure rather than the impact itself. Confidence matters when justifying control investment; the substantive harm is that genuine events are missed or ignored amid the noise, defeating the control's detective purpose.
- ✓
Increased risk of missing actual security incidents.
Why this is correct
A high false positive rate floods reviewers with benign alerts, causing alert fatigue and desensitisation. Genuine indicators get dismissed or overlooked among the noise, so actual security incidents escape detection, directly undermining the detective control's purpose.
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Reduced system performance due to alert processing.
Why it's wrong here
Alert processing consumes negligible resources relative to the control's purpose, so performance is not the material consequence. Processing overhead would matter for high-volume inline inspection, but a detective control's value lies in flagging genuine events, which false positives directly undermine.
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Increased cost of investigating alerts.
Why it's wrong here
Investigation effort is a real operational burden, yet it is a downstream cost rather than the primary damage. Cost concerns suit budgeting and resourcing decisions; the more significant impact is that analysts and management stop trusting alerts, so genuine incidents go unactioned.
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JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This CRISC practice question is part of Courseiva's free ISACA 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 CRISC exam.