During a security review of a new development sandbox, a security analyst recommends masking a copy of the production customer database before developers begin testing. What is the primary objective of masking the data in this scenario?
To irreversibly transform data into a cryptographic string to verify its integrity
To physically separate sensitive data from the rest of the organization's data environment
To obscure specific data elements within a database to hide sensitive information from unauthorized viewers
To encrypt data with a cryptographic key to ensure only authorized users can access the content
The purpose of data masking is to prevent unauthorized individuals from seeing real sensitive values while still permitting legitimate use of the data set-for example, in testing or analytics. Masking replaces or scrambles the original contents so they appear realistic but do not expose confidential information. Unlike encryption, which requires a key to decrypt, or hashing, which is one-way and used for integrity checking, masking focuses on hiding the true data from prying eyes while maintaining operational usefulness. Physical separation is a different control altogether.
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