stackhawk-hawkscan-false-positives

Guidance for reviewing security-scan findings and deciding whether they are real problems or false positives. A false positive is a warning that does not represent an actual vulnerability.

In plain words
What is it for?
It helps assess findings on health endpoints, public APIs, login pages, headers, and rate limits, then fix, suppress, or report accepted risks.
Why use it?
It helps avoid ignoring genuine security issues while documenting findings that are expected or not relevant to production.

Cursor rule for Cursor

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add rules/stackhawk/agent-skills/stackhawk-hawkscan-false-positives
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/stackhawk/agent-skills

Made for: Cursor.

Per session 31 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 2,262 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00031 $0.02262
Opus 5 $0.00015 $0.01131
Sonnet 5 $0.00006 $0.00452
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00226

Measured 2d ago against content hash e568843e3f29, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

stackhawk-hawkscan-false-positives scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

cursor/.cursor/rules/stackhawk-hawkscan-false-positives.mdc · 251 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 251 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

False Positives and Accepted Risk

Contents


Identifying False Positives

Not every finding from a DAST scan is a real vulnerability. Some common false positive scenarios:

  • Health check or status endpoints that intentionally return server info (e.g., /health, /actuator/info) may trigger "Information Disclosure" findings
  • CORS headers set intentionally permissive for public APIs
  • Deliberately open endpoints (public API docs, login pages) flagged for missing authentication
  • Security headers on non-HTML responses — CSP, X-Frame-Options findings on JSON API endpoints that never serve HTML
  • Rate limiting findings on endpoints that are already behind an API gateway enforcing rate limits

How to Decide: Fix or Suppress?

Signal Action
The finding describes real user-input handling with no sanitization Fix it
The finding is on a test/mock endpoint not present in production Suppress — exclude the path
The finding is on an intentionally open endpoint (health, docs) Suppress — exclude the path
The finding is a header issue on a non-HTML API response Suppress — exclude the path or accept the risk
You're unsure Fix it — false negatives are worse than false positives

Suppression via Config

Exclude specific paths from scanning

The scanner is pinned to the host: value in stackhawk.yml and will not traverse to other hosts. You do not need to add external domains or CDN URLs to excludePaths — the scanner won't follow them.

Use excludePaths for same-host paths that generate noise without security value: static assets (images, CSS, JavaScript bundles), health endpoints, API docs, and similar paths that are either not user-controllable or not relevant to security testing.

Read the full file on GitHub · 251 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 2d ago First seen · 251 lines · 31 tokens per session scan A e568843e3f29

Subscribe to this mod's changes

stackhawk-hawkscan-false-positives is a cursor rule published in the GitHub repository stackhawk/agent-skills (16 stars, last pushed 12d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 31 tokens to every session and 2,262 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.