Why you should never, ever, convert Powerpoint to PDF
Mashable broke the story on a certain Joost PDF document which contains a lot more than it initially seems. Found in the wild, on a server of one of Joost’s employees, the file is a PDF presentation of some of Joost’s technicalities. But simply selecting the text, copying and pasting it to notepad reveals a whole lot more data. Yes, some of it is definitely not meant to be seen by the public; it includes a number of Joost’s upcoming deals with media content providers.
Let’s quickly explain how can this happen. PDFs are usually used by the government precisely because they’re quite safe: they contain very little metadata, unlike Word documents which can (depending on the version) contain a lot of hidden stuff. My (educated) guess is that in this case, someone created one Powerpoint presentation. Then opened the same document, and created new boxes on top of old ones, which thus became invisible. And after that, (ironically) probably to be on the safe side, they converted the entire thing to PDF thinking that the old data is gone. But, it’s not - it’s simply not immediately visible.
To illustrate how this works, I’ve created a simple PDF document with hidden text underneath the image, in the same way: by creating a Powerpoint presentation first, and then printing it to PDF format. You can check it out here; to see the hidden text, select all, copy and paste to notepad.
The moral of the story is: never, ever convert sensitive data from Powerpoint presentation to PDF. It might get you into a lot of trouble.
May 18th, 2007 at 2:42 pm
[…] Frantic Industries has the quick and dirty as to how this happened. The person developing the presentation placed text boxes on top of other text, rather than deleting the original text. When this presentation was converted to PDF, the convertor saw this hidden text, placed in on the page, then placed the new text on top of it. Visually, they look the same - but when you copy-paste, you copy all of the text on the page - including the hidden data. […]
May 18th, 2007 at 2:54 pm
“FranticIndustries rock!” Couldn’t agree more
May 18th, 2007 at 2:55 pm
@Ola: (;
May 19th, 2007 at 4:40 am
Franticindustries rock!
Good one, never knew this was possible.
May 19th, 2007 at 5:06 am
[…] Joost’s Powerpoint-PDF Poof: Not Intended, But Actually Good News May 19th, 2007 at 9:06 am You may have heard, courtesy of Pete Cashmore, that some of Joost’s own internal documents were leaked on to the web. Its kind of interesting from a technical point of view, but what’s more interesting is what the documents say. […]
May 19th, 2007 at 11:30 am
[…] Here is the first one and actually it is a “How not to”. If you also prefer not to disclose your business secrets to the world unknowingly I suggest you check “Why you should never, ever, convert Powerpoint to PDF”. […]
May 19th, 2007 at 9:17 pm
[…] Via: FranticIndustries […]
May 21st, 2007 at 9:24 am
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