Post-processing is any step performed after the main event or data capture to change how the result looks, works, or is interpreted. In cyber security, that can mean parsing raw logs, normalizing alert data, extracting indicators, redacting secrets, compressing evidence, or generating reports from telemetry.
It matters because defenders rarely use raw output directly. Security tools depend on post-processing to turn noisy data into something analyzable, searchable, and actionable. At the same time, attackers may try to confuse or evade these steps by using unusual encodings, malformed fields, timestamp tricks, or log poisoning so that important events are hidden or misread. Good post-processing is therefore part of detection quality: it can improve investigation speed, but it must be validated so it does not drop evidence or create blind spots.