In my last series of posts, I talked about a few ways technology can be used for…hrm, let’s say, disreputable purposes. In the past couple of weeks, the government has provided two additional examples of how the technology tables can be turned.
First, on December 7th, the world found out that the TSA released a document from 2008 titled “SCREENING MANAGEMENT: STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURES.” The document had been redacted using Adobe Acrobat and then released in PDF format. Perfectly safe, right? Well, as long as the reader doesn’t know how to copy and paste. BTW: most computer forensic examiners have known about this weakness in Acrobat for several years.
Then, this past week we found out that terrorists have been able to intercept video feeds of Predator drones flying over Iraq and Afghanistan because the video feeds weren’t encrypted. Where have these guys been?!?!? My home network is more secure!
Fun and Games with Adobe
Here’s another little trick you can do with Adobe Acrobat – I found this one the hard way.
To demonstrate, I have created a document using Adobe Illustrator. There are two document layers in the original Illustrator file – one with my ‘To Do’ list and one with a portion of my Baloney Manifesto. When I was done creating the document, I turned visibility off for the layer with my manifesto on it. Then I exported the document as a PDF.
Right-click the link below and save the document to your computer.
Next, open the file you saved with Adobe Acrobat. Just a harmless looking To Do list, right?
Now, in Acrobat, go to View >> Navigation Panels and select Layers. The Layers panel should open on the left-hand side of Acrobat showing the two layers in my document. Check the checkbox next to “Layer 2” and voilà – my manifesto!
You might also be able to do this within your browser if you have the right plug-in installed. Look at the picture below – click the icon that looks like two pieces of paper and you should see the Layers panel.
Layers panel in Internet Explorer Acrobat plug-in.
Now be honest – how many of you knew there could be hidden layers in PDF documents?