COMMENTARY: I grabbed coffee last week with a CISO who told me something that caught my attention: "We get 10,000 alerts a day. On a good day, maybe 100 are real."
What struck me wasn't the number itself because I've heard worse. But rather how casually he said it, as if it were just another Monday on the security team.
When did we collectively decide that being wrong 99% of the time was acceptable? In what other profession would such high failure rates be considered normal?
The scale of the problem
Here's the uncomfortable truth: nearly half of all security findings are false positives. We're asking security professionals to build their entire defense strategy on a foundation where every other "critical vulnerability" doesn't actually exist.
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I've been in this industry long enough to remember when a security alert carried real weight. Now? One of our customers recently shared that their team spends 80% of their time investigating alerts that lead nowhere. "It's like being a detective where half the crime scenes are just movie sets," he told me during our quarterly review.
This gets compounded by the rise of sophisticated, AI-powered attack methods, and an alarming increase in both the frequency and scale of cyberattacks. In this environment, wasting time on inaccurate findings isn’t just inefficient — it’s dangerous.
How we accepted the unacceptable
The transformation happened gradually over the past decade. First, we celebrated the sensitivity of our tools — "Look, we catch everything!" Then, we rationalized the inaccuracy, "Better safe than sorry." Eventually, we simply accepted it, "It’s just part of the job."
But here's what we lost along the way: accuracy isn't the enemy of security; it's the foundation of it. A fire alarm that activates every time someone makes a toast isn't providing protection, it's just teaching us to ignore real emergencies.
In conversations with security leaders, I consistently hear the same frustration: "We don't trust our own tools anymore." One banking
CISO put it this way: "We've become professional skeptics of our own security stack."
The real cost of inaccuracy
The damage extends far beyond wasted man-hours, though at an average security analyst's salary, false positives cost organizations hundreds of thousands annually in misdirected effort. The deeper problem: decision paralysis.
When everything appears critical, nothing truly is critical. Teams develop alert fatigue, creating dangerous blind spots where genuine threats go unnoticed while analysts investigate non-existent vulnerabilities. I've seen organizations miss actual breaches because the real threat was buried among hundreds of false alerts.
Consider this scenario: if the security team investigates 1,000 alerts monthly and 500 are false positives, they’re not just wasting resources, they’re actively undermining the organization’s security posture by eroding trust in the team’s detection capabilities.
The validation revolution: Beyond hope and prayer
Here’s where
continuous threat exposure management (CTEM) promises to fundamentally shift the paradigm. Instead of relying on predictions or assumptions, it moves security teams toward evidence-based validation. It’s like switching from a weather forecast on TV to a live webcam feed pointed exactly where the team needs it. There’s no more guessing on what the conditions are. We can see them for outselves, in real-time, with tangible proof.
But in today’s fast-moving threat landscape, manual validation isn’t enough. To keep up and scale effectively, we must automate validation. It works by automatically, safely, and continuously confirming whether identified vulnerabilities are genuinely exploitable. It’s like having a cybersecurity fact-checker working in real time, separating signal from noise before it ever reaches your team.
Today’s most advanced validation systems are also leveraging AI to eliminate false positives and verify each finding with speed and precision — dramatically reducing alert noise while increasing confidence.
One manufacturing client reduced their alert volume by 70% within the first month of implementing automated validation techniques. Their security team went from investigating 2,000 critical alerts to focusing on 200 validated, actionable findings. "For the first time in years," their security director told me, "we actually trust what our tools are telling us."
Less than 1% false positives isn't a marketing fantasy — it's an engineering reality when validation becomes standard practice. We've seen organizations achieve this consistently by implementing external validation protocols that confirm findings before any human intervention is required.
The mathematics are straightforward: if we can validate findings before escalation, we eliminate the guesswork. Real vulnerabilities fail gracefully under controlled testing, false positives vanish.
The path forward requires a fundamental shift in how we think about security findings. Accuracy isn't a nice-to-have feature, it's the prerequisite for everything else we're trying to accomplish.
Security teams deserve better than spending their careers investigating phantoms. They deserve tools that respect their expertise by delivering findings they can trust, act upon, and defend to executive leadership without hesitation.
The false positive crisis isn't inevitable, it's a choice. We can continue accepting that half our security findings are worthless, or we can demand validation, accuracy, and respect for the professionals trying to keep our organizations and society safe.
Eran Shtauber, chief executive officer, ULTRA-REDSC Media Perspectives columns are written by a trusted community of SC Media cybersecurity subject matter experts. Each contribution has a goal of bringing a unique voice to important cybersecurity topics. Content strives to be of the highest quality, objective and non-commercial.
