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Cisco Secure Access Help Built-in Data Identifiers Create a Custom Identifier

Last updated: Aug 14, 2025

Create a Custom Identifier

A custom identifier can be used as part of a data classification to define terms and pattern expressions a DLP rule must match to generate an incident. You can optionally further restrict matching criteria using additional qualifiers:

  • Specify a threshold, to indicate the minimum number of occurrences of a term or pattern that must appear within a document to qualify as a match.

  • Specify proximity keywords, at least one of which must appear within 20 terms of a term or pattern to qualify as a match.

If you specify both a threshold and proximity keywords, a document is considered a match only if it contains a custom identifier term or pattern that appears at least the number of times indicated by threshold, and at least one of those occurrences appears within 20 terms of at least one of the proximity keywords.


 
Secure Access blocks documents containing a custom identifier only if the identifier is surrounded by a word boundary. A document containing a custom identifier with an alphanumeric character (a-z, A-Z, 0-9) adjacent to it will not be blocked. For example, for the custom identifier c.t matches cat and cot, but not housecat or citation.

Once you create a custom identifier, you can add it to a data classification. To create a data classification, see Create a Data Classification or Copy and Customize a Built-In Data Classification.