Which of the following courses of action is appropriate?

A Chief Executive Officer (CEO) is concerned about the company’s intellectual property being leaked to competitors. The security team performed an extensive review but did not find any indication of an outside breach. The data sets are currently encrypted using the Triple Data Encryption Algorithm.

Which of the following courses of action is appropriate?
A . Limit all access to the sensitive data based on geographic access requirements with strict role-based access controls.
B . Enable data masking and reencrypt the data sets using AES-256.
C . Ensure the data is correctly classified and labeled, and that DLP rules are appropriate to prevent disclosure.
D . Use data tokenization on sensitive fields, reencrypt the data sets using AES-256, and then create an MD5 hash.

View Answer

Answer: B

Explanation:

Data masking is a technique that replaces sensitive data with fictitious but realistic data, thus preventing unauthorized access to the original data. Reencrypting the data sets using AES-256 would provide a stronger level of encryption than Triple DES, which has been deprecated by NIST due to its vulnerability to attacks12

Reference: 1 What Is AES-256 Encryption? How Does It Work? – MUO 2 Archived NIST Technical Series Publication