SSCP Risk Identification, Monitoring, and Analysis Practice Question
A security analyst is tuning a SIEM to reduce false positives. Which of the following actions is most likely to reduce false positives while maintaining detection of real threats?
⚠ Common exam trap
Many exam-takers confuse 'reducing false positives' with 'eliminating all alerts,' leading them to choose disabling detection rules (Option C) or whitelisting (Option D), rather than understanding that correlation tuning preserves detection capability while filtering noise.
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
✓
Modify correlation rules to require multiple events before alerting
Modifying correlation rules to require multiple events before alerting reduces false positives by ensuring that a single benign event does not trigger an alert. This technique, often called 'thresholding' or 'event correlation,' filters out noise while still detecting multi-step attack patterns, such as a brute-force login attempt that requires multiple failed logins within a time window.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Increase the severity of all alerts to high
Why it's wrong here
Raising every alert to high severity changes prioritisation labels, not detection logic, so the same benign events still fire and generate noise. It is tempting because severity tuning feels like triage improvement, and would be correct for ensuring genuine critical detections are escalated promptly.
- ✓
Modify correlation rules to require multiple events before alerting
Why this is correct
Requiring several correlated events before an alert fires suppresses single-event noise, which is the main source of false positives, while genuine multi-stage attacks still trigger. This threshold tuning preserves detection fidelity better than disabling rules outright.
- ✗
Disable all anomaly-based detection rules
Why it's wrong here
Disabling anomaly-based rules removes the detection capability itself, so genuine deviations from baseline behaviour go unnoticed, rather than reducing false positives while preserving threat detection. It appeals because anomaly rules are notoriously noisy in environments lacking a stable behavioural baseline, such as newly deployed or highly dynamic estates.
- ✗
Create a whitelist for known benign IP addresses
Why it's wrong here
Whitelisting benign IPs suppresses alerts from those addresses, but attackers spoofing or operating from them evade detection entirely, and it does nothing for the row-level false positives the SIEM generates. It is tempting because IP allowlisting genuinely suits trusted internal scanners or vulnerability-assessment hosts generating expected traffic.
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JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This SSCP practice question is part of Courseiva's free ISC2 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 SSCP exam.