In today’s competitive digital landscape, data is at the heart of business operations. Every transaction, login, and digital interaction generates data, which, when leveraged effectively, drives growth, enhances customer experiences, and improves operational efficiency. However, collecting and managing this data comes with risks—particularly through data logging and data hashing. While these processes are essential for system performance and cybersecurity, businesses that fail to secure them properly can face significant financial losses, regulatory penalties, and reputational damage.

This article provides a comprehensive overview of data logging and data hashing, outlines the potential dangers for businesses, and provides recommendations for mitigating these risks and protecting your organization’s valuable data assets.

What is Data Logging? Data logging involves collecting and recording data over time, typically for monitoring, analysis, compliance, or troubleshooting purposes. Businesses across industries use data loggers—hardware devices or software solutions—to capture a range of information, including website traffic, customer transactions, system performance metrics, and environmental conditions in supply chains. Data logging provides these benefits:

Operational Efficiency: Helps organizations monitor systems and optimize processes
Regulatory Compliance: Maintains necessary records to meet data protection laws like GDPR or HIPAA
Troubleshooting and Incident Response: Enables faster root cause analysis when technical issues arise

While data logging provides significant business benefits, poorly managed logs can become a liability if they expose sensitive customer information or proprietary business data.

In cybersecurity, data logging involves recording user activities, login attempts, and system events. While beneficial for detecting suspicious activity, improper management of these logs can expose sensitive information to cybercriminals.

What Is Data Hashing?

Data hashing is a cryptographic process that converts data into a fixed-length string of characters. Businesses use hashing to enhance data integrity and protect sensitive information.

In the realm of cybersecurity, hashing plays a critical role in maintaining data integrity and enhancing password protection. It involves converting data into a hash to ensure it remains unchanged during storage or transmission. Hashing is widely used in:

Password Management: Storing hashed versions of passwords instead of plain text
Digital Signatures: Verifying the authenticity of messages or documents
File Integrity Checks: Ensuring that files have not been altered or corrupted
Regulatory Compliance: Demonstrates secure data handling to auditors and regulatory bodies
Secure Data Storage: Prevents direct exposure of customer and employee information in databases

For example, e-commerce companies use hashing to securely store payment details, reducing liability in case of a data breach.

Dangers of Data Logging and Data Hashing

Without proper safeguards, data logging can create vulnerabilities that cybercriminals exploit. The consequences for businesses include data breaches, financial losses, and damaged customer trust. Key business risks include:

Unauthorized Access: Inadequately secured logs can reveal customer data, login credentials, or financial information.
Data Breaches: Cyber attackers often target logs to obtain sensitive information and compromise business operations.
Regulatory Non-Compliance: Failing to secure logs properly can result in hefty fines and legal consequences.
Operational Disruptions: Overloaded or poorly managed logs can slow down business systems, affecting productivity.
Insider Threats: Employees with unchecked access to logs can misuse sensitive data.

As mentioned, businesses use data loggers to monitor everything from warehouse temperatures to IT infrastructure. While these devices streamline operations, they can also introduce risks if not secured. Here are risks to be aware of:

Physical Security Breaches: Unauthorized access to devices can lead to data theft
Firmware Vulnerabilities: Outdated devices may serve as entry points for cybercriminals
Unencrypted Data Transmission: Exposes sensitive information to interception

Despite its importance, data hashing can present risks if improperly implemented. These include:

Weak Hashing Algorithms: Legacy algorithms like MD5 and SHA-1 are vulnerable to modern attacks.
Hash Collisions: Different inputs producing the same hash can compromise data integrity.
Rainbow Table Attacks: Cybercriminals use precomputed tables to reverse weak hashes.
Salting Failures: Without adding random data (salts), hashes become easier to crack.
Implementation Errors: Poor coding practices can negate the benefits of strong hashing algorithms.

In 2023, several high-profile companies suffered data breaches due to the use of outdated hashing techniques.

Data Logging and Data Hashing Best Practices

The cost of a data breach extends beyond immediate financial loss. Customer trust, brand reputation, and long-term profitability are all at stake. Implementing secure data storage and comprehensive data breach prevention strategies is crucial.

For data logging, here are best practices for consideration:

Secure Log Storage

Encrypt logs at rest and in transit to prevent unauthorized access.
Store logs in centralized, secure locations with restricted physical and digital access.

Access Management

Implement role-based access controls (RBAC) to limit who can view or modify logs.
Regularly audit access logs to identify potential misuse or insider threats.

Log Retention Policies

Establish clear policies for how long logs are stored, balancing compliance and security needs.
Safely delete outdated logs to reduce risk exposure.

Regular Monitoring and Analysis

Use automated tools for real-time monitoring to quickly detect suspicious activity.
Continuously review logs to identify trends, anomalies, and potential threats.

Compliance and Privacy Considerations

Ensure logs comply with data protection regulations (e.g., GDPR, HIPAA).
Avoid logging sensitive information unless necessary and ensure it’s appropriately protected.

Secure Data Logger Devices

Regularly update firmware to patch vulnerabilities.
Secure physical devices against unauthorized access.
Use encrypted communication protocols for data transmission.

And Consider These Best Practices For Data Hashing:

Use Strong Hashing Algorithms

Opt for modern, secure algorithms like SHA-256, bcrypt, or Argon2.
Avoid outdated algorithms like MD5 and SHA-1, which are susceptible to attacks.

Implement Salting and Peppering

Add a unique salt to each data input before hashing to prevent rainbow table attacks.
Use a secret pepper stored separately from the hash to add another security layer.

Regularly Update Hashing Practices

Stay updated with cryptographic advancements and revise hashing methods accordingly.
Rehash stored data using stronger algorithms as security standards evolve.

Secure Hash Storage

Do not store plain-text versions of sensitive data alongside hashes.
Ensure hashed data is stored in secure, access-controlled databases. Validate Data Integrity.
Use hashing for file integrity checks, ensuring that transmitted data has not been altered.

Avoid Implementation Errors

Follow cryptographic best practices to prevent coding errors that weaken hash security.
Utilize trusted libraries and frameworks to ensure robust hashing processes.

LevelBlue Data Logging and Data Hashing Protection

LevelBlue offers advanced security services to mitigate the risks associated with data logging and data hashing. Our comprehensive approach ensures your data remains secure from both external threats and internal vulnerabilities.

LevelBlue Managed Threat Detection and Response: Protect your organization with 24/7, proactive security monitoring powered by our open XDR platform, LevelBlue USM Anywhere, that automates security log analysis and management.
LevelBlue Managed Threat Detection and Response for Government: Secure highly regulated data with 24/7 proactive monitoring and incident response, and a platform architected to handle sensitive government data.
LevelBlue Managed Endpoint Security with SentinelOne: Protect your endpoints at machine speed with integrated threat intelligence and 24/7 threat monitoring by the LevelBlue SOC.
LevelBlue Next-Generation Firewall: Prevent data breaches by inspecting traffic, enforcing segmentation, and using role-based access control (RBAC) to limit access to sensitive data.
LevelBlue Zero Trust Network Access: Ensure robust security by continuously verifying and authenticating all traffic, preventing data leaks, and safeguarding enterprise applications from threats with granular access controls.
LevelBlue Guardicore: Protect critical applications and prevent lateral movement in attacks with microsegmentation to enforce Zero Trust across your environment.
LevelBlue Managed Vulnerability Program: Secure your organization’s complete attack surface through comprehensive exposure and vulnerability services, integrating industry-leading vulnerability management tools, offensive security testing, and expert consulting services.
LevelBlue Privacy Program Services: Evaluate, build, and mature your organization’s privacy program with assessments against industry frameworks. We design, implement, and monitor privacy programs.
Incident Response Retainer: Get instant access to cybersecurity experts that will help you quickly contain an incident, limit its damage, and reduce recovery time and costs.

Data logging and data hashing are essential for modern business operations, but mishandling these processes can lead to significant risks. By understanding the potential dangers and taking proactive steps to secure your data, you protect not only your company’s bottom line but also your reputation and customer relationships.

Ready to enhance your business’ data protection strategy? Contact LevelBlue now to learn how we can help you build a resilient, secure future.

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A message posted on Monday to the homepage of the U.S. Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is the latest exhibit in the Trump administration’s continued disregard for basic cybersecurity protections. The message instructed recently-fired CISA employees to get in touch so they can be rehired and then immediately placed on leave, asking employees to send their Social Security number or date of birth in a password-protected email attachment — presumably with the password needed to view the file included in the body of the email.

On March 13, a Maryland district court judge ordered the Trump administration to reinstate more than 130 probationary CISA employees who were fired last month. On Monday, the administration announced that those dismissed employees would be reinstated but placed on paid administrative leave.

A notice covering the CISA homepage said the administration is making every effort to contact those who were unlawfully fired in mid-February.

“Please provide a password protected attachment that provides your full name, your dates of employment (including date of termination), and one other identifying factor such as date of birth or social security number,” the message reads. “Please, to the extent that it is available, attach any termination notice.”

The message didn’t specify how affected CISA employees should share the password for any attached files, so the implicit expectation is that employees should just include the plaintext password in their message.

Email is about as secure as a postcard sent through the mail, because anyone who manages to intercept the missive anywhere along its path of delivery can likely read it. In security terms, that’s the equivalent of encrypting sensitive data while also attaching the secret key needed to view the information.

What’s more, a great many antivirus and security scanners have trouble inspecting password-protected files, meaning the administration’s instructions are likely to increase the risk that malware submitted by cybercriminals could be accepted and opened by U.S. government employees.

The message in the screenshot above was removed from the CISA homepage Tuesday evening and replaced with a much shorter notice directing former CISA employees to contact a specific email address. But a slightly different version of the same message originally posted to CISA’s website still exists at the website for the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which likewise instructs those fired employees who wish to be rehired and put on leave to send a password-protected email attachment with sensitive personal data.

This is hardly the first example of the administration discarding Security 101 practices in the name of expediency. Last month, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) sent an unencrypted email to the White House with the first names and first letter of the last names of recently hired CIA officers who might be easy to fire.

As cybersecurity journalist Shane Harris noted in The Atlantic, even those fragments of information could be useful to foreign spies.

“Over the weekend, a former senior CIA official showed me the steps by which a foreign adversary who knew only his first name and last initial could have managed to identify him from the single line of the congressional record where his full name was published more than 20 years ago, when he became a member of the Foreign Service,” Harris wrote. “The former official was undercover at the time as a State Department employee. If a foreign government had known even part of his name from a list of confirmed CIA officers, his cover would have been blown.”

The White House has also fired at least 100 intelligence staffers from the National Security Agency (NSA), reportedly for using an internal NSA chat tool to discuss their personal lives and politics. Testifying before the House Select Committee on the Communist Party earlier this month, the NSA’s former top cybersecurity official said the Trump administration’s attempts to mass fire probationary federal employees will be “devastating” to U.S. cybersecurity operations.”

Rob Joyce, who spent 34 years at the NSA, told Congress how important those employees are in sustaining an aggressive stance against China in cyberspace.

“At my former agency, remarkable technical talent was recruited into developmental programs that provided intensive unique training and hands-on experience to cultivate vital skills,” Joyce told the panel. “Eliminating probationary employees will destroy a pipeline of top talent responsible for hunting and eradicating [Chinese] threats.”

Both the email to fired CISA workers and DOGE’s ongoing efforts to bypass vetted government networks for a faster Wi-Fi signal are emblematic of this administration’s overall approach to even basic security measures: To go around them, or just pretend they don’t exist for a good reason.

On Monday, The New York Times reported that U.S. Secret Service agents at the White House were briefly on alert last month when a trusted captain of Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) visited the roof of the Eisenhower building inside the White House compound — to see about setting up a dish to receive satellite Internet access directly from Musk’s Starlink service.

The White House press secretary told The Times that Starlink had “donated” the service and that the gift had been vetted by the lawyer overseeing ethics issues in the White House Counsel’s Office. The White House claims the service is necessary because its wireless network is too slow.

Jake Williams, vice president for research and development at the cybersecurity consulting firm Hunter Strategy, told The Times “it’s super rare” to install Starlink or another internet provider as a replacement for existing government infrastructure that has been vetted and secured.

“I can’t think of a time that I have heard of that,” Williams said. “It introduces another attack point,” Williams said. “But why introduce that risk?”

Meanwhile, NBC News reported on March 7 that Starlink is expanding its footprint across the federal government.

“Multiple federal agencies are exploring the idea of adopting SpaceX’s Starlink for internet access — and at least one agency, the General Services Administration (GSA), has done so at the request of Musk’s staff, according to someone who worked at the GSA last month and is familiar with its network operations — despite a vow by Musk and Trump to slash the overall federal budget,” NBC wrote.

The longtime Musk employee who encountered the Secret Service on the roof in the White House complex was Christopher Stanley, the 33-year-old senior director for security engineering at X and principal security engineer at SpaceX.

On Monday, Bloomberg broke the news that Stanley had been tapped for a seat on the board of directors at the mortgage giant Fannie Mae. Stanley was added to the board alongside newly confirmed Federal Housing Finance Agency director Bill Pulte, the grandson of the late housing businessman and founder of PulteGroup — William J. Pulte.

In a nod to his new board role atop an agency that helps drive the nation’s $12 trillion mortgage market, Stanley retweeted a Bloomberg story about the hire with a smiley emoji and the comment “Tech Support.”

But earlier today, Bloomberg reported that Stanley had abruptly resigned from the Fannie board, and that details about the reason for his quick departure weren’t immediately clear. As first reported here last month, Stanley had a brush with celebrity on Twitter in 2015 when he leaked the user database for the DDoS-for-hire service LizardStresser, and soon faced threats of physical violence against his family.

My 2015 story on that leak did not name Stanley, but he exposed himself as the source by posting a video about it on his Youtube channel. A review of domain names registered by Stanley shows he went by the nickname “enKrypt,” and was the former owner of a pirated software and hacking forum called error33[.]net, as well as theC0re, a video game cheating community.

Stanley is one of more than 50 DOGE workers, mostly young men and women who have worked with one or more of Musk’s companies. The Trump administration remains dogged by questions about how many — if any — of the DOGE workers were put through the gauntlet of a thorough security background investigation before being given access to such sensitive government databases.

That’s largely because in one of his first executive actions after being sworn in for a second term on Jan. 20, President Trump declared that the security clearance process was simply too onerous and time-consuming, and that anyone so designated by the White House counsel would have full top secret/sensitive compartmented information (TS/SCI) clearances for up to six months. Translation: We accepted the risk, so TAH-DAH! No risk!

Presumably, this is the same counsel who saw no ethical concerns with Musk “donating” Starlink to the White House, or with President Trump summoning the media to film him hawking Cybertrucks and Teslas (a.k.a. “Teslers”) on the White House lawn last week.

Mr. Musk’s unelected role as head of an ad hoc executive entity that is gleefully firing federal workers and feeding federal agencies into “the wood chipper” has seen his Tesla stock price plunge in recent weeks, while firebombings and other vandalism attacks on property carrying the Tesla logo are cropping up across the U.S. and overseas and driving down Tesla sales.

President Trump and his attorney general Pam Bondi have dubiously asserted that those responsible for attacks on Tesla dealerships are committing “domestic terrorism,” and that vandals will be prosecuted accordingly. But it’s not clear this administration would recognize a real domestic security threat if it was ensconced squarely behind the Resolute Desk.

Or at the pinnacle of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). The Washington Post reported last month that Trump’s new FBI director Kash Patel was paid $25,000 last year by a film company owned by a dual U.S. Russian citizen that has made programs promoting “deep state” conspiracy theories pushed by the Kremlin.

“The resulting six-part documentary appeared on Tucker Carlson’s online network, itself a reliable conduit for Kremlin propaganda,” The Post reported. “In the film, Patel made his now infamous pledge to shut down the FBI’s headquarters in Washington and ‘open it up as a museum to the deep state.’”

When the head of the FBI is promising to turn his own agency headquarters into a mocking public exhibit on the U.S. National Mall, it may seem silly to fuss over the White House’s clumsy and insulting instructions to former employees they unlawfully fired.

Indeed, one consistent feedback I’ve heard from a subset of readers here is something to this effect: “I used to like reading your stuff more when you weren’t writing about politics all the time.”

My response to that is: “Yeah, me too.” It’s not that I’m suddenly interested in writing about political matters; it’s that various actions by this administration keep intruding on my areas of coverage.

A less charitable interpretation of that reader comment is that anyone still giving such feedback is either dangerously uninformed, being disingenuous, or just doesn’t want to keep being reminded that they’re on the side of the villains, despite all the evidence showing it.

Article II of the U.S. Constitution unambiguously states that the president shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed. But almost from Day One of his second term, Mr. Trump has been acting in violation of his sworn duty as president by choosing not to enforce laws passed by Congress (TikTok ban, anyone?), by freezing funds already allocated by Congress, and most recently by flouting a federal court order while simultaneously calling for the impeachment of the judge who issued it. Sworn to uphold, protect and defend The Constitution, President Trump appears to be creating new constitutional challenges with almost each passing day.

When Mr. Trump was voted out of office in November 2020, he turned to baseless claims of widespread “election fraud” to explain his loss — with deadly and long-lasting consequences. This time around, the rallying cry of DOGE and White House is “government fraud,” which gives the administration a certain amount of cover for its actions among a base of voters that has long sought to shrink the size and cost of government.

In reality, “government fraud” has become a term of derision and public scorn applied to anything or anyone the current administration doesn’t like. If DOGE and the White House were truly interested in trimming government waste, fraud and abuse, they could scarcely do better than consult the inspectors general fighting it at various federal agencies.

After all, the inspectors general likely know exactly where a great deal of the federal government’s fiscal skeletons are buried. Instead, Mr. Trump fired at least 17 inspectors general, leaving the government without critical oversight of agency activities. That action is unlikely to stem government fraud; if anything, it will only encourage such activity.

As Techdirt founder Mike Masnick noted in a recent column “Why Techdirt is Now a Democracy Blog (Whether We Like it or Not),” when the very institutions that made American innovation possible are being systematically dismantled, it’s not a “political” story anymore: It’s a story about whether the environment that enabled all the other stories we cover will continue to exist.

“This is why tech journalism’s perspective is so crucial right now,” Masnick wrote. “We’ve spent decades documenting how technology and entrepreneurship can either strengthen or undermine democratic institutions. We understand the dangers of concentrated power in the digital age. And we’ve watched in real-time as tech leaders who once championed innovation and openness now actively work to consolidate control and dismantle the very systems that enabled their success.”

“But right now, the story that matters most is how the dismantling of American institutions threatens everything else we cover,” Masnick continued. “When the fundamental structures that enable innovation, protect civil liberties, and foster open dialogue are under attack, every other tech policy story becomes secondary.”

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