False positives: A big problem for secret scanners

False positives are a significant challenge in cybersecurity as they can distract security teams, exhaust resources, and increase the risk of missed threats. They occur when secret scanning solutions flag legitimate content as suspicious due to overly sensitive tools, lack of contextual data, or insufficient functionality. The costs of false positives include missed threats, wasted time and resources, increased labor costs, security tool maintenance, alert fatigue, burnout and turnover, and decreased trust in security systems. HCP Vault Radar is designed to reduce false positives by assigning severity levels to findings, evaluating high entropy content, performing activeness checks, correlating secrets with Vault, and allowing custom ignore rules. Additionally, it supports remediation workflows via ticketing and alerting solutions.