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 encrypt data with a cryptographic key to ensure only authorized users can access the content
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 irreversibly transform data into a cryptographic string to verify its integrity
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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