Data Masking

5 minutes 5 Questions

Data masking is a technique used to obfuscate sensitive data by altering or replacing the original information with fictitious, yet structurally similar data. The primary goal of data masking is to protect the confidentiality of sensitive data while maintaining its usability for non-sensitive purposes, such as testing, analytics, or training. There are several techniques to perform data masking, including substitution, shuffling, encryption, and masking out. These methods effectively reduce the risk of data leakage or unauthorized access to sensitive information, especially when sharing data with third parties or utilizing it in non-secure environments. Data masking contributes to a comprehensive cybersecurity strategy by ensuring that sensitive data remains confidential and compliant with industry-specific regulations and standards.

Comprehensive Guide to Data Masking for CompTIA Security Plus Exam

Understanding Data Masking:
Data Masking is essentially a method where you conceal specific data within a database to prevent it from exposure to non-authorized users. The data is replaced with fictitious yet realistic data, rendering it unreadable but usable.

Importance of Data Masking:
The key importance lies in data protection. It conclusively minimizes the risk of sensitive data breach and is critical during data transfer among servers or during software testing.

How Data Masking Works:
It can semi-permanently or permanently conceal data via several methods. These include substitution, encryption, creating fictitious data, shuffling, and nulling out data.

Exam Tips: Answering Questions on Data Masking
When dealing with the data masking questions in the exam, the clear understanding of its core functions, its implementation, and the various ways it can be applied, are very important. Recognize scenarios which would require data masking for protection, and which methods are optimal to use based on different contexts. Remember, it is important to consider situations where data needs to be usable yet protected.

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Question 1

An e-commerce application displays a confirmation page after a successful order. Which data masking technique should be used to protect the customer's credit card information displayed on the confirmation page?

Partial Masking Full Masking Shuffling Tokenization

Correct Answer: Partial Masking

Partial Masking allows us to mask only specific parts of the data, such as credit card numbers, while still showing some of the original data to ensure recognition by the user. It is the best method to protect sensitive data like credit card information in confirmation pages.

Question 2

A university's course registration system needs to protect student email addresses from unauthorized access by third-party users. Which data masking technique should be used?

Obfuscation Hashing Encryption Substitution

Correct Answer: Substitution

Substitution is a suitable method to mask sensitive data like student email addresses. It replaces the actual data with other values of the same format, preventing unauthorized users from accessing the actual data while maintaining the display format of the data.

Question 3

A company wants to implement data masking for their customer service agents to protect customer data. What data masking method should be applied to meet this requirement?

Dynamic data masking Static data masking Tokenization Input validation

Correct Answer: Dynamic data masking

Dynamic data masking allows sensitive information to be masked in real-time, permitting customer service agents to work efficiently without accessing the original data. Static data masking is not suitable as it requires copying the data and could impact the agents' productivity. The other options do not provide the necessary data masking functionality for this scenario.

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