An engineer receives an incident ticket with hundreds of intrusion alerts that require investigation. An analysis of the incident log shows that the alerts are from trusted IP addresses and internal…

Moving the IPS to after the firewall facing the internal network would expose it to even more internal trusted device traffic, compounding the false positive problem rather than resolving it.

Placing the IPS before the firewall on the external-facing side means it inspects inbound internet traffic prior to any filtering, focusing exclusively on untrusted external sources. This removes internal trusted IP addresses from the IPS inspection path entirely, which was the root cause of the false positive alerts, and allows the firewall to handle internal traffic policy enforcement.

Configuring a proxy service on the IPS is unrelated to placement or traffic segmentation and does not address false positives generated from trusted internal IP addresses.

Reverse port forwarding is a network redirection technique with no relevance to IPS sensor placement or alert tuning.