When you need to share logs, how do you handle redaction and sanitization?
I’m looking for a way to automate/semi-automate it as it can take quite some time.
If an automation is needed for sanitizing logs, it should generally work in three layers:
- Automated obfuscation - a script walks through log folders and replaces sensitive values (usernames, hostnames, emails, IPs, tokens, file paths, etc.) with deterministic placeholders like
<USER:CASE123:8h3kL9zA>
<HOST:CASE123:Q3F7d8a2>
This would keep correlations inside the same case but removes any identifying data.
2. Safety validation – every sanitized set is scanned again for residual PII patterns (emails, Windows paths, IPs, certificates). If anything slips through, the process fails before the logs go anywhere else.
3. Offline analysis scripts – once logs are clean, our tools parse and summarize them automatically (timestamps, error codes, components, frequency charts, repeated patterns, etc.).
With such an approach, no cloud services are involved, and nothing sensitive ever leaves the environment.