Redacted, but Not Gone

🔍 Details

📝 Description

This confidential financial report contains sensitive information that has been blacked out—or has it?

🧩 Hints

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💡 Solution

Although some portions of the PDF appear blacked out, the redaction was done incorrectly — the text is still selectable and extractable.

There are two simple ways to access the hidden content:

1. Manual method:
   Open the PDF in any reader, hover over the redacted (blacked-out) area, select the text, and copy-paste it into a text editor.

2. Command-line method:
   Use pdftotext to extract the raw content:

📚 Insights

Redacting sensitive information in PDFs by simply placing a black rectangle over text is a critical human error. This doesn't remove the actual content — it only obscures it visually.

Proper redaction requires:

• Removing the text content from the document structure (not just overlaying),
• Using dedicated redaction tools that sanitize metadata and embedded content.

🤔 Comments