Andre, a security professional, was tasked with segregating the employees' names, phone numbers, and credit card numbers before sharing the database with clients. For this purpose, he implemented a deidentification technique that can replace the critical information in database fields with special characters such as asterisks (*) and hashes (#).
Database View
Deidentification Simulation
ID
Name
Phone
Credit Card
001
John Smith
555-0142
4532-7891-0023-4567
002
Maria Lopez
555-0298
5412-3300-9981-2244
003
Ahmed Khan
555-0377
6011-4520-8876-1133
Toggle between views to see how masking replaces sensitive data with special characters
Assessment
Which of the following techniques was employed by Andre in the above scenario?
A Tokenization
B Masking
C Hashing
D Bucketing
💡 The technique replaces sensitive data with special characters like * and # while preserving the field structure.
Knowledge Base
Mini Lesson
1
Definition: Masking is a deidentification technique that replaces sensitive data with special characters (such as * or #) to hide the original values while keeping the data format intact.
2
How it works: The original data fields are overwritten with placeholder characters. For example, a credit card number becomes ****-****-****-4567, preserving structure but hiding the actual value.
3
Why it matters: It allows organizations to share databases with third parties without exposing personally identifiable information (PII), helping meet compliance requirements like GDPR and PCI-DSS.
4
Real-world example: A bank sharing transaction records with an analytics firm, where customer names and card numbers are masked with asterisks before export.
5
Key takeaway: Masking replaces sensitive data with special characters — it is not reversible and differs from tokenization (which substitutes tokens) and hashing (which produces fixed-length digests).