Andre, a security professional, was tasked with segregating the employees' names, phone numbers, and credit card numbers before sharing the database…

Data masking is a de-identification technique used to hide original data with modified content, such as asterisks () or hashes (#), to protect sensitive information like credit card numbers or Personally Identifiable Information (PII) from unauthorized exposure. It ensures the data remains structurally usable for testing, sharing, or display purposes without revealing the actual sensitive values to unauthorized personnel.

A. Tokenization: Replaces sensitive data with a non-sensitive equivalent (token) that maps back to the original data via a secure database, rather than obscuring it with asterisks.
C. Hashing: A one-way cryptographic function that converts data into a fixed-size string of characters, not replacing specific characters with asterisks.
D. Bucketing: A data generalization technique that groups data into ranges (e.g., age 20-30) rather than obscuring specific characters.

1. NIST Special Publication 800-122, "Guide to Protecting the Confidentiality of Personally Identifiable Information (PII)", Section 4.2.

2. EC-Council Certified Cybersecurity Technician (CCT) v1 Courseware, Module 12: Data Security.