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.​

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation:

Secret scanning push protection is a proactive feature that scans for secrets in your code during the push process. If a secret is detected, the push is blocked, preventing the secret from being added to the repository. This helps prevent accidental exposure of sensitive information.​

GitHub Docs

When integrating CodeQL outside of GitHub Actions (e.g., in Jenkins, CircleCI):

Install the CLI: Needed to run CodeQL commands.

Analyze code: Perform the CodeQL analysis on your project with the CLI.

Upload scan results: Export the results in SARIF format and use GitHub’s API to upload them to your repo’s security tab.

You don’t need to write custom queries unless extending functionality. “Processing alerts” happens after GitHub receives the results.

Dependabot builds a dependency graph by analyzing package manifests and lockfiles in your repository. This graph includes both direct and transitive dependencies. It then compares this graph against the GitHub Advisory Database, which includes curated, security-reviewed advisories.

This method provides a comprehensive and automated way to discover all known vulnerabilities across your dependency tree.

To change the threshold that defines whether a pull request fails due to code scanning alerts (such as blocking merges based on severity), the user must haveAdminaccess on the repository. This is because modifying these settings falls under repository configuration privileges.

Users with Write, Maintain, or Triage roles do not have the required access to modify rulesets or status check policies.

You can customize CodeQL scanning by including additionalquery packsor by specifying individualqueries:

Packs: These are reusable collections of CodeQL queries bundled into a single package.

Queries: You can point to specific files or directories containing .ql queries to include in the analysis.

github/codeql refers to a pack by name but is not a method or field. Scope is not a valid field used for configuration in this context.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation:

Dependency review is triggered by specific events in GitHub workflows:​

pull_request: When a pull request is opened, synchronized, or reopened, GitHub can analyze the changes in dependencies and provide a dependency review.​

workflow_dispatch: This manual trigger allows users to initiate workflows, including those that perform dependency reviews.​

The trigger and commit options are not recognized GitHub Actions events and would not initiate a dependency review.​

In a workflow: GitHub Actions workflows are the most common place for CodeQL code scanning. The codeql-analysis.yml defines how the analysis runs and when it triggers.

In an external CI system: GitHub allows you to run CodeQL analysis outside of GitHub Actions. Once complete, the results can be uploaded using the upload-sarif action to make alerts visible in the repository.

You cannot run or trigger analysis from third-party repositories directly, and theFiles changed tabin pull requests only shows diff — not analysis results.

These three features provide a complete layer of defense:

Code scanningidentifies security flaws in your source code

Secret scanningdetects exposed credentials

Dependency reviewshows the impact of package changes during a pull request

Together, they give developers actionable insight into risk and coverage throughout the SDLC.

When secret scanning is enabled on a private repository,GitHub performs a read-only analysisof the repository's contents. This includes the entire Git history and files to identify strings that match known secret patterns or custom-defined patterns.

GitHub does not alter the repository, and enabling secret scanningdoes not automatically enablecode scanning or dependency review — each must be configured separately.

All results from CodeQL analysis appear under therepository’s code scanning alertstab. This section is part of theSecuritytab and provides a list of all current, fixed, and dismissed alerts found by CodeQL.

A CodeQL database is used internally during scanning but does not display results. Query packs contain rules, not results. Security advisories are for published vulnerabilities, not per-repo findings.

Using theCustomsetting allows you to subscribe to specific event types, such as Dependabot alerts or vulnerability notifications, without being overwhelmed by all repository activity. This is essential for repository maintainers who need fine-grained control over what kinds of events trigger notifications.

This setting is configurable per repository and allows users to stay aware of critical issues while minimizing notification noise.

The best proactive control ispush protection. It scans for secretsduring a git pushand blocks the commitbeforeit enters the repository.

Other options (like CODEOWNERS or security managers) help with oversight but do not prevent secret leaks.

Making a repo public would increase the risk, not reduce it.