Nuance and Appligent team up to secure PDFs

The data thief’s watchword: “No one destroys all copies of a document.” Apparently, PDF’s are the same. The file format, which has recently been submitted to the International Organization for Standardizations for approval, is very popular because it is generally seen as more secure than Microsoft Word documents. Yet a recent report by the BBC found that redacted sensitive documents still contain information that has been “blanked out.” In one disturbing case, the U.S. Army released a report in which sensitive data about miliary checkpoints had been redacted in a word processing format before being converted to a PDF for release. Unfortunately, the nature of the PDF format permitted spies to uncover what had been thought to have been hidden. The oversight resulted in the death of Italian secret agent Nicoli Calipari.

To help strengthen PDF content security, Burlington, Massachusetts-based Nuance Communications, a speech and imaging solutions company, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania-based Appligent, a redaction and manipulation solutions company, have teamed up to release an add-on for the popular PDF Converter Professional that will allow redaction of sensitive documents with speed and ease. Its redaction capabilities ensure that text is removed from all layers of the PDF and its built in batch removal features allows the

program to remove a pre-typed list of words or phrases from a range of

documents. Thus, as in the case mentioned above, the document preparer could instruct the program to scrub the PDF of any mention of the words “checkpoint”, “inspection”, or “secret agent”. The Redax & Stamp add-on solution costs $79.

-read more in this company news release