Incomplete PDF Redaction Leaks Data From UK MoD 171
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."
Re:Only safe way to do it... (Score:4, Informative)
Or, y'know, replace the text with "[redacted]". If you black out the text, you're still giving away information on its length.
Re:Only safe way to do it... (Score:4, 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.
Re:Don't hide information. (Score:5, Informative)
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.