Your user data is always at risk of being compromised during a security breach in your application—and no application is 100 percent impenetrable. However, using the right data masking tools can make it easier to protect personal user data and keep your application from making headlines as the next victim of a data breach.
Data masking is the process of modifying the original characters in a dataset to protect it from exposure. It’s an essential method for protecting identifiable information, financial records, health information, and other sensitive data that criminals can use to commit fraud or identity theft.
There are two different types of data masking that most often apply to the digital landscape.
Static data masking uses predefined rules to sanitize sensitive data before storing or sharing it. It’s an ideal choice for data that remains consistently static over time and isn’t subject to frequent changes, or data that is typically kept at rest.
Your security team can predefine your SDM parameters and consistently apply them to your data, ensuring consistent coverage across all environments.
The right data masking program can easily and automatically set these parameters and implement them as an algorithm to protect your most sensitive information.
In contrast to static data masking, which focuses on protecting data at rest, dynamic data masking protects information in real time as users access it. While it keeps the original data intact in your database, it only allows users with above a certain level of permissions to see the unmasked data. All others without these permissions only see a masked version of the data.
Dynamic data masking is primarily used as a role-based security measure for applications that handle customer support, medical records, or other sensitive information.
Data masking techniques are essential for protecting sensitive and private information from potential attackers. In keeping with industry standards and government regulations, organizations must protect customer data and safeguard proprietary information.
By altering the appearance of confidential information, you can protect it in the event of a data breach and make it harder for attackers to understand. This makes it harder to reverse engineer or track to its original values without direct access to the unmasked data.
There are also several types of data masking tools your development and security teams can use to keep your users’ data safe. These are some of the most effective options for protecting your data.
For organizations that need a baseline level of protection, open-source data masking tools can help obscure sensitive data on a budget. They offer the essentials and help organizations stay compliant with the ever-growing range of data protection regulations. Some even allow users to implement custom masking rules, but this isn’t true of all open-source tools.
However, because they are open-source, they require constant vigilance to ensure the software remains up-to-date and not at risk of a data breach.
The cybersecurity landscape offers a range of data encryption tools from numerous entities. Because they are not fully open source and offer more context-aware protection capabilities, entity-based data masking software is often the better choice for organizations that need a more sophisticated approach to data masking.
Even more, entity-based data masking tools, such as those from PreEmptive, make it easier to automate your code protection. They offer a more future-proof set of capabilities and better productivity because many of them offer prebuilt masking functions by design. They can also be easier to implement without guesswork if you collaborate with the software provider to address your needs directly.
If you’re looking to improve your security posture and add layers of protection for your users’ information, data masking software can be an instrumental tool. Here are some of the ways it can make a difference for your application, your organization, and your users.
Exposing even a few digits of a customer’s social security or credit card number can make it easier for a criminal to compromise all their most sensitive data. Data masking tools enable you to more easily protect the information they store. In turn, your users will be safer and will never have to worry about whether you’re protecting their personal identifying data.
By protecting the integrity of your data, you preserve your business value and consumer trust in your brand and organization. In turn, they’ll be more likely to continue wanting to work with your business. They might also be more willing to recommend your application or services to others like them, so your business will be better poised for growth because you’ve taken the steps to protect your customers or clients.
Data breaches are getting more costly by the year. They can easily result in millions of dollars in fines, class-action lawsuits, and settlements for which your organization could be on the hook.
Entity-based data masking tools, especially cloud-native options, can help you protect your users and their data from attacks. It replaces users’ data with fictional, predefined, or encrypted datasets using algorithms that are impossible for hackers to reverse-engineer without the proper permissions if they access your system.
PreEmptive’s suite of code obfuscation tools makes it easier to protect user data on multiple fronts. Across both desktop and mobile applications, Dotfuscator, DashO, and JSDefender encrypt your data in multiple programming languages.
Among other things, PreEmptive’s tools support your data masking efforts with these features:
PreEmptive’s line of code obfuscation tools keeps your application safe from digital threats, both present and future. Request your free trial today to see how your application can benefit.