When you are creating your scripts, it is best practice to leverage some sort of obfuscation or encryption for sensitive data. There are many different strategies that you can use to secure your data. One is leveraging string and script encoding. Encoding takes your human readable string or script, and scrambles it to make it more difficult for someone to see what the actual code is. The downsides of encoding are that you must decode the script to make changes to it and decoding does not require the use of a password or passphrase. Thus, someone can easily decode your sensitive data using the same method you would use to decode the script.
The alternative to encoding is leveraging an encryption algorithm. Encryption algorithms provide multiple mechanisms to secure your scripts and strings. While you can encrypt your entire script, it's most common to encrypt the sensitive data in the scripts themselves, or answer files.
One of the most popular encryption algorithms...