CompTIA Security+ SY0-701 (V7) Practice Question

The primary purpose of masking sensitive data is to prevent unauthorized users from viewing its actual content while still allowing the data to be usable for certain operations or processes. This is accomplished by hiding the original data with modified content (such as replacing or scrambling data), which is reversible only when necessary and appropriate. Other methods like encryption and hashing are designed for different security controls: encryption secures data by making it unreadable without the correct key and is meant to be reversible, whereas hashing is used to verify data integrity and is not reversible.