GitHub Administrator GH-500 Book

By default, users with Write, Maintain, or Admin permissions will receive notifications for new Dependabot alerts . However, Write permission is the minimum level needed to be automatically notified. Users with only Read access do not receive alerts unless added explicitly.

The first step when you receive a secret scanning alert is to revoke the secret if it is still valid. This ensures the secret can no longer be used maliciously. Only after revoking it should you proceed to remove it from the code history and apply other mitigation steps.

Simply deleting the secret from the code does not remove the risk if it hasn’t been revoked — especially since it may already be exposed in commit history.

The organization-level secret-scanning control represented by this question applies to the organization's private repositories that use the applicable Advanced Security or Secret Protection capability. Public repositories are treated differently because GitHub runs secret scanning for public repositories automatically and provides that protection independently of a paid Advanced Security license. Disabling secret scanning also does not disable every other Advanced Security capability; code scanning, dependency features, and related security controls are managed separately or through security configurations. Current GitHub administration increasingly manages these features through Secret Protection and organization-level security configurations, but the principle remains that disabling the licensed secret-scanning capability affects repositories to which that configuration applies rather than universally switching off every security feature. Therefore, C is the intended answer.

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