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Incomplete PDF Redaction Leaks Data From UK MoD

Posted by timothy on from the peekaboo-theory dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The UK Ministry of Defence has been left with egg on its face, after a supposedly redacted PDF detailing secrets related to air defence radar systems was published on a parliamentary website. The problem? Whoever did the redacting simply changed the sensitive text to black on a black background, making it possible for anyone to access the information simply by cutting-and-pasting. The incident is particularly embarrassing for the Ministry, as six months ago precisely the same security screw-up occurred — that time related to sensitive information about nuclear submarines."

3 of 171 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Only safe way to do it... by TheSpoom · · Score: 3, Informative

    Or, y'know, replace the text with "[redacted]". If you black out the text, you're still giving away information on its length.

    --
    It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
    - E. Debs
  2. Re:Only safe way to do it... by wvmarle · · Score: 3, Informative

    Indeed. There has been at least one story here on /. a few years ago detailing how in some cases the missing words could be recovered. In that case a document where place names (cities or countries, I forgot) were removed.

    They were recovered by precisely measuring the distance between the non-blacked-out words, the size of the letters of the font used, and then mixing and matching until you found a word (name) that had the correct length in that font. Usually a few matches were found but from the context the correct one was easily deduced.

  3. Re:Don't hide information. by LingNoi · · Score: 4, Informative

    At least Buddhism teaches real things, real values and there's no imaginary persons, as Buddha himself has actually lived. And he said to think and evaluate things with your own brains, instead of following some stupid book.

    Your pedestal opinion of Buddhism will change once you've been in a country with 90+% Buddhists for any length of time. They're no better then Christians, even with pushing their faith on others regardless of the intent of the religion.