`historical_secret`

CWE-798

Historical Secret — a PullGuard finding type. Findings of this type appear in the PR comment, Step Summary, SARIF (GitHub Security tab / IDE viewers), and the HTML report, each with severity, location, and the remediation guidance below.

How to fix

Rotate the leaked credential immediately — git history does not un-leak it medium effort

# AWS: aws iam update-access-key --status Inactive # GitHub PAT: delete at github.com/settings/tokens

Optionally rewrite git history with git-filter-repo to scrub the secret high effort

git filter-repo --replace-text replacements.txt

Documentation →

Triage

Suppress a confirmed non-issue with a committed .pullguardignore entry (pullguard ignore locally, or comment /pullguard ignore <fingerprint> <reason> on the PR — the fingerprint is printed in the PR comment’s Triage section). Entries support expiresAt for time-boxed snoozes.

Security findings at major or critical severity — and any critical finding — always surface: .pullguardignore cannot hide them. The reviewed paths that keep them visible are acknowledged (reviewed, stays in reports) and, for a confirmed false positive, a reasoned false_positive entry — visible and audited, excluded only from the merge block.