Why are false positives such a problem with IPS technology?

File integrity monitoring is a separate security control unrelated to IPS rule-based traffic inspection and false positive generation.

Malicious code bypassing detection describes a false negative, which is the opposite problem from a false positive.

Legitimate services being disrupted is the downstream consequence of false positives, not the technical reason why false positives occur within IPS rule evaluation.

IPS systems depend on rule sets to distinguish malicious from legitimate traffic, but these rules are complex and can be imprecise or overly broad, causing the engine to misinterpret normal traffic as an attack. This misinterpretation is the root technical reason false positives are a persistent problem - the rules themselves cannot perfectly model every legitimate traffic pattern. As a result, valid sessions are incorrectly blocked whenever the engine applies a rule to traffic it was not designed to match.