PCI and Personal Data Anonymization

In the last few years, billion-dollar companies like Yahoo and Equifax have had data breaches causing millions of people’s personal information to be leaked online. Other billion-dollar companies like Google and Facebook have gotten in trouble for abusing people’s personal information for financial gain as well. In this new age of technology where everything is being digitalized and stored online, people all over the world are concerned about what is happening to their personal information and how they can trust it is being kept safe. This paper describes, first, the importance of protecting user data, second, one easy tool that companies and developers can use to help ensure that their user’s information (credit card information specifically) is kept safe, how to implement that tool, and finally, future work and research that needs to be done. The solution I propose is a software tool that will keep credit card data secured. It is only a small step towards achieving a completely secure data anonymized system, but when implemented correctly, it can reduce the risk of credit card data from being exposed to the public. The software tool is a script that can scan every viable file in any given system, server, or other file-structured Linux system and detect if there any visible credit card numbers that should be hidden.