Question

A security engineer at a financial services company wants to detect a proprietary internal API key format (e.g., FINX-<32 hex chars>) across all repositories in their GitHub Enterprise Cloud organization. They have written a custom secret scanning pattern but are concerned that a poorly written regular expression could generate thousands of false positives that overwhelm the security team. What should they do before publishing the pattern to all repositories?

Accepted Answer

Run a dry run of the custom pattern at the organization level to preview matches without creating alerts, then refine the regex before publishing

Answer

Enable push protection for the pattern first, since push protection validates the regex syntax before any scanning occurs

Answer

Publish the pattern to a single test repository and manually delete false-positive alerts before rolling it out organization-wide

Answer

Submit the custom pattern to GitHub Support for validation against known secret formats prior to activation