Mary found a high vulnerability during a vulnerability scan and notified her server team. After analysis, they sent her proof that a fix to that issue had already been applied. The vulnerability…

A false-negative is the opposite scenario - a real vulnerability exists but the scanner fails to detect and report it, which is more dangerous and is not what occurred here.

A false-positive occurs when a security tool reports a finding that is not actually present - in this case the scanner flagged a vulnerability that had already been remediated. This commonly happens when scanner signatures are outdated or when the tool cannot confirm whether a patch has been applied. False-positives waste remediation resources and erode trust in scanning results.

A brute force attack is an offensive technique used to guess passwords or encryption keys through exhaustive enumeration and has no relation to how vulnerability scan results are classified.

A backdoor is an undocumented or unauthorized access path into a system - it is a type of threat or vulnerability, not a classification applied to a scanning tool's output.