How do you differentiate between false positives and real threats?

Incident response teams differentiate between false positives and genuine threats during their investigations by utilizing various techniques and tools. These may include:

1. Threat Intelligence: Teams leverage threat intelligence feeds and databases to compare indicators of compromise (IoCs) from incidents against known threat signatures.

2. Behavioral Analysis: They analyze the behavior of the system or network to determine if the alerts raised are consistent with typical threat patterns or are anomalies that could indicate a genuine threat.

3. Contextual Understanding: Teams consider the context surrounding an alert, such as the system’s normal operations, configuration changes, or user behavior, to determine if the alert is a false positive.

4. Correlation of Data: By correlating data from multiple sources, such as logs from different systems and network traffic, they can validate alerts and identify potential genuine threats.

5. Manual Investigation: Incident responders conduct manual investigations to validate alerts, perform forensics analysis, and determine if the activity represents a real threat.

6. Collaboration: Teams collaborate with other security professionals, share information within the security community, and use collective knowledge to identify and verify threats.

By employing a combination of these methods and tools, incident response teams can effectively differentiate between false positives and genuine threats during their investigations.