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False Positive

nounverified·updated Aug 28, 2026

An alert that incorrectly indicates that malicious activity is occurring.

MWENISTIR 7298: Glossary of Key Information Security Terms, Revision 2

Senses

False Positive

1. An alert that incorrectly indicates that a vulnerability is present. 2. An alert that incorrectly indicates that malicious activity is occurring. 3. An instance in which a security tool incorrectly classifies benign content as malicious. 4. Incorrectly classifying benign activity as malicious. 5. An erroneous acceptance of the hypothesis that a statistically significant event has been observed. This is also referred to as a type 1 error. This is also referred to as a type 1 error. When “health-testing” the components of a device, it often refers to a declaration that a component has malfunctioned – based on some statistical test(s) – despite the fact that the component was actually working correctly.

Classification: True vs. False and Positive vs. Negative

an outcome where the model incorrectly predicts the positive class.

National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence: The Final Report

An example in which the model mistakenly classifies an item as in the positive class

Trustworthy Machine Learning

A false positive is approving an applicant who should be denied

Classifications

Entity Type

Event85%llm-generatedllm:claude-haiku-4-5
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Sensitivity

95%llm-generatedllm:claude-haiku-4-5
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Information Class

95%llm-generatedllm:claude-haiku-4-5
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Variants

synonym
Type I error (in statistics)
plural
False Positives
possessive
False Positive's
pluralpossessive
False Positives'