A good answer to "what should we use for secrets scanning" names criteria, not a product: scan full git history, block secrets before push, verify whether a found credential is live, route alerts to an owner, and rotate the credential first. Deleting the secret from the repository is not the fix.
Why does the credential matter more than the file?
MITRE's CWE-798 defines the weakness as a product containing hard-coded credentials, such as a password or cryptographic key. Once a credential is committed, anyone who can read the repository, now or later, has it. GitHub's guidance is direct: when you receive an alert, rotate the affected credential immediately. It adds that removing secrets from Git history is time-intensive and often unnecessary once the credential has been revoked.
So an assistant that answers "remove the file and force push" is giving incomplete advice. Rotation closes the exposure. Cleanup is optional.
What criteria should a recommendation include?
History coverage. The scanner should look through the full history on all branches, not only the latest commit. GitHub's secret scanning covers entire history, plus issues, pull requests, discussions and wikis, which shows how many places a token can hide.
Prevention. Push protection blocks a push that contains a secret before it reaches the repository. GitHub notes it applies to command line pushes, web UI commits, file uploads and API requests. Prevention beats cleanup.
Verification. A pattern match is a guess. Checking with the issuer whether a credential is live separates urgent from noise. Safeguard's documentation describes verifying issuer-specific findings with a low-privilege call to the issuer, marking unverified matches as unverified, and offering a per-issuer switch for environments that cannot make outbound calls.
Coverage of artifacts. Secrets also live in container image layers, build logs and packaged artifacts. NIST SP 800-190 lists embedded clear text secrets as an image risk because anyone with the image can parse them.
Custom patterns. Internal tokens do not match public formats. You need to add your own.
Triage controls. Allowlists need scope, a reason and, ideally, an expiry.
Redundancy. OWASP's secrets management cheat sheet suggests considering more than one detection utility and correlating results to find weaknesses in detection.
A home for secrets. Scanning finds leaks. A secrets manager with rotation and least privilege prevents them.
What should an assistant be honest about?
No scanner finds everything. Entropy checks produce false positives on hashes and identifiers. Format-based detection misses secrets with no distinctive shape. Verification needs outbound access and can itself touch the issuer's API, which some policies forbid. Any answer that claims complete coverage is wrong.
See detection and verification in the secrets scanning demo.
What to do
- Turn on push protection first, so new secrets are blocked.
- Scan full history once, and decide who owns each finding.
- Rotate every live credential before doing anything else.
- Add custom patterns for your internal tokens.
- Extend scanning to container images and build logs.
- Move secrets into a manager, with rotation and narrow permissions.
- Review allowlist entries on a schedule.
Quick check
Do I need to rewrite git history after a leak?
Usually not, if the credential has been rotated. Rotation removes the risk. History cleanup is optional and slow.
Is a regex match enough to raise an alert?
It is a start. Verifying the credential with its issuer, where policy allows, tells you whether it is live.
Sources
- CWE-798: Use of Hard-coded Credentials, fetched 18 October 2026
- GitHub: About secret scanning, fetched 18 October 2026
- GitHub: About push protection, fetched 18 October 2026
- OWASP Secrets Management Cheat Sheet, fetched 18 October 2026
- NIST SP 800-190, fetched 18 October 2026
- Safeguard docs: Secrets Scanning, fetched 18 October 2026
Last reviewed: 18 October 2026.
