The Cost of Crying Wolf: Why False Positives Are Killing Your SOC

Introduction

It’s not the alerts you miss that break a SOC — it’s the thousands you never should have seen in the first place.

False positives eat up analyst time, erode trust in the tooling, and slowly kill detection strategies from the inside out.

The worst part? Most of them are entirely avoidable.

How False Positives Happen

Let’s call it out: false positives usually come from rushed or misaligned detection logic — rules built without:

• Asset awareness
• Suppression logic
• Realistic thresholds
• Contextual enrichment

We’ve all seen it:

• A “suspicious login” from a known admin
• A “critical vulnerability” alert… from a printer
• A “lateral movement” detection on an air-gapped box

Every one of these eats up analyst minutes — and multiplies across a noisy system.

The Real Impact

🔥 Burnout
🤖 Automation mistrust
📉 Leadership loses confidence

Analysts stop investigating real alerts because they’ve been trained to ignore the console. That’s how breaches happen.

Fixes That Work

✅ Suppression based on historical patterns
✅ Logic that says “only trigger if X + Y + Z”
✅ External context: identity, business role, asset criticality
✅ Use of macros to isolate noise-generating index sources
✅ Detection-as-code processes that allow version control and review

Start simple: audit your Top 10 Noisiest Rules.

If they’ve never resulted in escalation or meaningful triage in the last 30 days — fix them, or kill them.

Final Word

False positives are expensive. They waste time. They dull sharp teams.

A good detection engineer doesn’t just write new rules.
They ruthlessly cut the ones that shouldn’t exist.