HACK REDACTED PDF PDF

The most common example of incorrectly redacted documents is the one that I started the article with. An additional step is to sanitize the document, cleaning up sneaky data like metadata, bookmarks, links, and anything that could have content in it that you do not want availableĪs you can see, if those steps are not followed properly, many things can go wrong, and you might end up distributing documents that still contain sensitive information.

The redaction annotations are reviewed and applied, permanently removing the content.

The content to be redacted is identified and redaction annotations are placed over it.

Redaction is typically a 2 step process, with an optional 3rd step The important and mandatory part of redaction is that the content is permanently removed from the document. This is traditionally a black box, however, it does not have to be a box, and the color does not have to be black. An optional piece of content is usually added in place of the removed content to indicate something has changed. So, what is redaction? In PDF, redaction is the act of removing content directly from the content stream of the page. I came to realize that a lot of the problems around bad redactions could possibly stem from the fact that it’s not clear what real redactions really are. They had thousands of incorrectly redacted documents and were looking for an automated solution to perform real redactions on those documents.

I was on a call with a company that had done just that. This happens more often than you would think. Everything is going great until a couple of years down the line, someone in your organization realizes that anyone can just move the black box “redaction” to uncover the social security number underneath.

HACK REDACTED PDF PDF

The resulting PDF looks perfectly redacted - after all, the content is blacked out. Then, the document was converted to a PDF file using Word’s built-in converter. One of the common practices used to be adding a black box over the targeted content using Word. So, your organization is redacting sensitive information, like social security numbers, out of documents prior to making them available to the public.

Hack redacted pdf