No More Dirty Documents
No More Dirty Documents
December 28, 2007: Updating its tools to fight dirty documents, ManTech has announced version 3.0 of its Document Detective is now available, claiming this new release provides enhanced protection for classified documents for government departments.
Titled Government Edition, ManTech claims version 3.0 is of the electronic document security tool prevents the disclosure of hidden data in classified documents by finding more hidden data thanks to an expanded ability to detect obscure text, and new tests to check for hidden data created by the ‘paste’ and ‘paste special’ functions in Microsoft Office files.
The firm says that Government Edition identifies and removes more than 100 types of hidden and meta data, including embedded objects, Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) files, Portable Document Format (PDF) files, Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and Extensible Markup Language (XML), plus comments and tracked changes in Microsoft’s PowerPoint, Excel and Word documents.
It also discovers and removes object fragments, which are created when an application fails to remove deleted information from a document.
ManTech says Document Detective has been designed specifically with governmental compliance levels in mind, and to process classified documents with 100 percent ‘reliable human review.’
Dirty documents have been in the headlines several times in the past year, with the most prominent example being the United Nations report on the assassination of the prime minister of Lebanon. The report was published online, and it was not long until journalists discovered that switching on ‘track changes’ in Microsoft Word enabled earlier versions of the documents - revealing the names of suspects in the assassination not disclosed in the final version – to be accessed.
This is exactly the kind of situation ManTech claims Document Detective can prevent by highlighting any information hidden in a document thanks to metadata and other new features in productivity software.
“Document Detective was developed to help the average user locate and remove hidden data that is frequently contained within electronic documents,” said Joseph L. Bergantz, Vice President and General Manager of ManTech. “We have been studying the problem of hidden data in electronic documents for more than five years and Document Detective 3.0 reflects that research and the feedback we have received from government and other users.”
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