top | item 18769902

(no title)

starbeast | 7 years ago

On the other hand, if you know something is bad for false positives then unless it is so bad as to be unusable, you would expect that, on average, getting a few results is dubious, but lighting up like a christmas tree probably means something is actually there.

discuss

order

acdha|7 years ago

That's really not a safe assumption — an incorrect result repeated thousands of times does not become correct — and it definitely means that you now have a big problem of reviewing and validating tons of noise which will delay the time before you find whatever valid results are present.

I've seen multiple tools in this class — code scanners, IDSes, or web app scanners — which caused security problems by training everyone to assume that the results are always false-positives until they missed something real or soaking up so much human time that nobody made progress on the major improvements which would have prevented a breach.