{"slug": "clearer-names-for-secret-scanning-detector-types", "title": "Clearer names for secret scanning detector types", "summary": "GitHub renamed its secret scanning detector types to improve clarity, changing 'Non-provider patterns' to 'Generic patterns' and 'Copilot secret scanning' to 'AI-detected secrets'. The update is a naming change only, with no impact on detection behavior, webhook events, audit log events, or the REST API.", "body_md": "# Clearer names for secret scanning detector types\n\nTo make secret scanning easier to understand, we’re updating the names we use for our detector types to better reflect how each one finds secrets. This is a naming change only; detection behavior is exactly the same.\n\n| Before | Now |\n|---|---|\n| Non-provider patterns | Generic patterns |\n| Copilot secret scanning | AI-detected secrets |\n\nAll existing product documentation links continue to work. We’ve added redirects and updated the terminology across our documentation. There are no changes to webhook events, audit log events, or the REST API.\n\nThere are two kinds of secrets we detect:\n\n**Provider secrets** are issued by a specific service (e.g., an AWS key, a Stripe token).**Generic secrets** aren’t tied to any provider (e.g., private keys, connection strings, passwords).\n\nThere are two ways we detect them:\n\n**Patterns use deterministic detection**(i.e., regular expressions combined with additional checks like entropy analysis). Patterns reliably catch secrets with a recognizable structure and include both provider patterns for provider secrets, as well as generic patterns like private keys and connection strings.**AI-detected secrets** use AI to catch generic secrets that don’t follow a predictable format (e.g., passwords). The model reads the surrounding code to find harder-to-detect unstructured secrets.\n\n[Learn more](#learn-more)\n\nLearn more about [secret scanning](https://docs.github.com/code-security/secret-scanning/introduction/about-secret-scanning) and see the [full list of supported secrets](https://docs.github.com/code-security/secret-scanning/introduction/supported-secret-scanning-patterns) in our documentation. Let us know what you think in the [community discussion](https://gh.io/community-secret-scanning).", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/clearer-names-for-secret-scanning-detector-types", "canonical_source": "https://github.blog/changelog/2026-07-10-clearer-names-for-secret-scanning-detector-types", "published_at": "2026-07-10 20:06:10+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-07-10 21:14:09.482988+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-tools", "developer-tools"], "entities": ["GitHub"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/clearer-names-for-secret-scanning-detector-types", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/clearer-names-for-secret-scanning-detector-types.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/clearer-names-for-secret-scanning-detector-types.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/clearer-names-for-secret-scanning-detector-types.jsonld"}}