If you used pixeling to edit sensitive information, you can use another method instead, as a security researcher has developed a new way to successfully recover pixel words from edited documents.
Leading researcher of the security firm Bishop Fox Dan Peter has published new information blog post detailing how he managed to completely recover the text from an image that had been edited in court for the pixelation method.
While both news agencies and researchers often use pixelation or blur to hide text in confidential images published online, Peter has demonstrated that it is much safer to use opaque stripes to hide text.
Peter began his research on how to get pixel words from edited documents after Jumpsec Labs set an open task for everyone to decipher text in a pixel image. After studying a number of methods of pixelation and deobfuscation, he came up with a solution to this problem and sent his findings to Jumpsec Labs.
Editor
So far there are a number of existing ones photo editing tools to improve pixel images of people or landscapes, so far there has been no tool capable of recovering text found in pixel images.
For this reason Peter and Bishop Fox released a new one open source tool on GitHub called Editor. The tool can properly restore the original text of a document completely if it has been edited by pixelation.
Peter provided additional information on how users who need to edit text in a document should do so in their blog, saying:
“The bottom line is that if you need to edit text, use black bars that cover the entire text. Never use anything else. No pixelation, no blur, no blur, no twist. Well, don’t forget to edit the text as an image. Don’t make the mistake of modifying a Word document so that it has a black background with black text. ”
Fortunately, many of Top pdf editors such as Adobe Acrobat DC already provide the ability to edit text in confidential business documents.
Through BleepingComputer