SSCP Risk Identification, Monitoring, and Analysis Practice Question
After implementing a new IDS, the security team receives numerous alerts about legitimate traffic being flagged as malicious. This phenomenon is known as:
⚠ Common exam trap
Candidates often confuse 'false positives' with 'noise' (Option B), but noise is a broader category that includes false positives as well as other irrelevant alerts, while the question specifically describes legitimate traffic being flagged as malicious, which is the precise definition of a false positive.
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
✓
False positives
A false positive occurs when the IDS incorrectly classifies legitimate traffic as malicious, generating an alert for benign activity. This is a common issue after deploying a new IDS with default or overly sensitive signature sets, leading to alert fatigue. The core reasoning is that the IDS's detection logic (e.g., pattern matching or anomaly thresholds) misidentifies normal behavior as an attack.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
False positives
Why this is correct
Legitimate traffic flagged as malicious constitutes false positives: the IDS incorrectly classifies benign activity as an attack. This directly matches the stem's constraint of numerous alerts on genuine traffic, distinguishing it from false negatives, which would be malicious traffic mistakenly permitted. Tuning detection thresholds reduces these erroneous alerts.
- ✗
Noise
Why it's wrong here
Noise describes the overall volume of irrelevant or low-value alerts, not the specific misclassification of legitimate traffic as malicious. It is tempting because excessive alerting feels like noise, and it would be correct when describing an unmanageable alert stream generally — but the phenomenon named here is the incorrect labelling itself, which is a false positive.
- ✗
False negatives
Why it's wrong here
False negatives are malicious events the IDS fails to alert on, so they produce missed detections rather than alerts on legitimate traffic. The term is tempting because it is the opposite error in the same confusion matrix, and it would be correct if attacks were passing undetected — but here benign activity is being flagged, which is a false positive.
- ✗
True positives
Why it's wrong here
True positives are alerts that correctly identify actual malicious activity, so they cannot describe legitimate traffic being flagged. The term is tempting because it is the desirable detection outcome, and it would be correct if the IDS were accurately catching real attacks — but the stem describes benign traffic generating alerts, which is a false positive.
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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.