False Positives Are the Past: How Application Fingerprinting Reset the Bar for Cyberstorage 

Andrew MacKay, CTO & CSO at Superna. Application Fingerprinting: 6 months in production 

Every security product produces false positives. It is the unavoidable cost of watching for anomalies in the real world; behavior that looks unusual is not always malicious. For years, Superna was no exception. But that is firmly in the past. 

Superna created the Cyberstorage category, bringing real-time ransomware detection and automated recovery directly to file and object storage. Today we are resetting the bar again, this time on operational simplicity, with Application Fingerprinting. 

We invented Cyberstorage. Now we have made it effortless to operate. 

The false-positive problem, solved by learning, not tuning 

Anomaly detection has always forced a trade-off: tune it loosely and you miss threats; tune it tightly and you drown in false positives from the perfectly normal, but unusual-looking, applications that run in every enterprise. Backup jobs, scientific pipelines, imaging exports, batch compute, build systems: all of them generate bursts of file activity that resemble the very patterns detectors are built to catch. 

Application Fingerprinting removes that trade-off. Instead of asking administrators to hand-tune rules and maintain endless whitelists, the technology learns the behavioral fingerprint of the applications and workflows in your environment, automatically, and suppresses the anomaly patterns they legitimately produce, while leaving genuine threat detection fully intact. 

Six months, hundreds of sites, every industry 

Application Fingerprinting has now been deployed for six months across hundreds of customer locations, spanning industries from automotive to healthcare. That breadth taught us something powerful: the technology learns the unique applications and workflows of each industry on its own. A genomics pipeline at a research hospital, a simulation workload at an automotive manufacturer, an imaging system in a clinical setting: each produces its own false-positive-inducing patterns, and each is fingerprinted and tracked without bespoke engineering. 

The breakthrough: any application, in any industry, can be fingerprinted and tracked to reduce the false positives of anomalous behavior, with no manual signature-writing and no per-customer customization. 

The results: 95-98% fewer false positives 

Across customer locations globally, the impact has been consistent and dramatic: 

• Greater than 95% reduction in false positives at customer sites globally. 

• As high as 98% reduction at some locations. 

• Self-improving: the technology learns recurring application behavior and drives suppression higher over time, with no analyst effort. 

In practice, that means the recurring, benign workloads that once generated a steady stream of alerts are recognized and quieted automatically, while the rare, genuinely suspicious event still rises to the top. 

More than 95% fewer false positives (up to 98%) with zero manual tuning. 

Ease of use, up 10x: immediate value on day one 

Dynamic user and application learning has increased ease of use ten-fold. There is no lengthy tuning phase and no whitelist backlog to maintain. Customers realize value immediately, and because the noise is gone, they can integrate Superna into their broader security ecosystem fast: Superna’s 70+ leading security-tool integrations are typically live within a week of deployment. 

Freeing the SOC to focus on real threats 

When false positives collapse, the Security Operations Center changes character. Instead of triaging noise, SOC teams focus on high-value, high-confidence indicators of compromise. Application Fingerprinting keeps analysts pointed at the threats that matter, and lets a fully automated data-protection solution act on the high-value threats in seconds. 

That automation closes the loop end to end: real-time detection, real-time mitigation, and push-button recovery of data at petabyte scale. 

• Detection: real-time identification of ransomware and anomalous behavior on unstructured data. 

• Mitigation: automated response in seconds, without waiting on a human in the loop. 

• Recovery: push-button restoration of data at PB scale. 

No other vendor offers a complete detection, mitigation, and recovery solution for file and object unstructured data. 

The bottom line 

False positives were a fact of life for every security product, Superna included. With Application Fingerprinting, they are a solved problem. We created the Cyberstorage category, and after six months in production across hundreds of sites and every major industry, we have set a new bar for operational simplicity, cutting false positives by more than 95%, freeing SOC teams to focus on real threats, and pairing it with the only complete detection-mitigation-recovery solution for unstructured data at scale. 

Learn more about Superna Application Fingerprinting and the Cyberstorage platform at superna.io.