The best way toprioritizesecret scanning alerts is tofilter by active secrets— these are secrets GitHub has confirmed are still valid and could be exploited. This allows security teams to focus on high-risk exposures that require immediate attention.

Sorting by time or filtering by custom patterns won’t help with risk prioritization directly.

TheSecurity tabin a GitHub repository provides a central location for viewing security-related information, especially when GitHub Advanced Security is enabled. The following can be accessed:

Number ofalertsrelated to:

Code scanning

Secret scanning

Dependency (Dependabot) alerts

Summary and visibility into open, closed, and dismissed security issues.

It doesnotshow 2FA options, access control settings, or configuration panels for GHAS itself. Those belong to account or organization-level settings.

Youmust enable secret scanningbefore defining custom patterns. Secret scanning provides the foundational capability for detecting exposed credentials, and custom patterns build upon that by allowing organizations to specify their own regex-based patterns for secrets unique to their environment.

Without enabling secret scanning, GitHub will not process or apply custom patterns.

Thesecurity-extendedquery suite includes additional CodeQL queries that detectlower severity issuesthan those in the default security-and-quality suite.

It’s often used when projects want broader visibility into code hygiene and potential weak spots beyond critical vulnerabilities.

The other options listed arepaths to language packs, not query suites themselves.

When defining a custom pattern for secret scanning, two key fields are required:

Name of the pattern: A unique label to identify the pattern

Secret format: A regular expression that defines what the secret looks like (e.g., token format)

You can optionally specifyadditional match requirements(like required context keywords), but they’re not mandatory. Listing repositories is also not part of the required fields during pattern creation.

To create or modify acode scanning workflow file(typically under .github/workflows/codeql-analysis.yml), you must haveWriteaccess to the repository.

Write permission allows you to commit the workflow file, which is required to run or configure code scanning using GitHub Actions.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation:

In private repositories, users with write access can fix code scanning alerts. They can do this by committing changes that address the issues identified by the code scanning tools. This level of access ensures that only trusted contributors can modify the code to resolve potential security vulnerabilities.​

GitHub Docs

Users with read or triage roles do not have the necessary permissions to make code changes, and the security manager role is primarily focused on managing security settings rather than directly modifying code.​