The most effective way to prioritize secret scanning alerts is to focus on those that pose an immediate and verifiable threat. Filtering to display "active" secrets achieves this. In the context of GitHub secret scanning, this refers to secrets that have been validated by the issuing partner (e.g., AWS, Microsoft) and are confirmed to be live credentials. An active, exposed credential represents a direct and high-priority risk of unauthorized access, making it the most critical category of alerts to address first. Sorting by age or focusing on pattern type are less direct indicators of immediate risk.

A. Sort to display the oldest first: This is an ineffective prioritization strategy, as older alerts may correspond to secrets that have already been rotated, revoked, or are no longer valid.

B. Sort to display the newest first: While useful for triaging recent commits, the age of an alert does not inherently correlate with its risk level compared to the confirmed validity of the secret.

D. Select only the custom patterns: The risk of a secret is determined by its validity and the permissions it grants, not whether it was detected by a custom or a built-in partner pattern.

1. GitHub Docs

"About secret scanning": This document explains the partner program

where detected secrets are sent to the service provider for validation. "When a secret is detected in a public repository

GitHub notifies the service provider who issued the secret. The service provider validates the credential and then decides whether they should revoke the secret

issue a new secret

or reach out to you directly..." This validation process is what identifies a secret as "active" and high-risk.

Source: GitHub Docs

docs.github.com/en/code-security/secret-scanning/about-secret-scanning#about-the-secret-scanning-partner-program.

2. GitHub Docs

"Managing alerts from secret scanning": This page details how to manage and filter alerts. While there isn't a literal filter named "active

" the principle of prioritizing based on validity is key. You can filter by secret types that are part of the partner program

which are the ones that get validated. The alert's metadata often indicates its status post-validation. Prioritizing these alerts is the primary strategy for risk reduction.

Source: GitHub Docs

docs.github.com/en/code-security/secret-scanning/managing-alerts-from-secret-scanning#filtering-secret-scanning-alerts.