e security. It would not be hard to regenerate the original 
credit card number from a masking operation such as: 4297 8296 7496 87XX 
since the numbers are generated with a specific and well known checksum algorithm. 
Also care must be taken not to mask out potentially required information. A masking 
operation such as XXXX XXXX XXXX 5379 would strip the card issuer details 
from the credit card number. This may, or may not, be desirable. 
 
Verdict: If the data is in a specific, invariable format, then Ma