Misuse detectors compare system activity, looking for events or sets of events that match a predefined pattern of events that describe a known attack. As the patterns corresponding to known attacks are called signatures, misuse detection is sometimes called "signature-based detection."

The most common form of misuse detection used in commercial products specifies each pattern of events corresponding to an attack as a separate signature. However, there are more sophisticated approaches to doing misuse detection (called "state-based" analysis techniques) that can leverage a single signature to detect groups of attacks.