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Manafort Left an Incriminating Paper Trail Converting PDFs to Word

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Re: Manafort Left an Incriminating Paper Trail Converting PDFs to Word

#41

Post by tlarkworthy »

blensor wrote: post #20
lisper wrote: post #4

Nixon was caught because he taped himself obstructing justice. Manafort was caught because he emailed incriminating documents in the clear. How the hell are we going to catch criminals who somehow avoid doing monumentally stupid things?

I think the problem is not as big because you don't need to have those people do monumentally stupid things all the time. It's sufficient if they do it every so often. And unless someone is an incredibly paranoid person which has the privacy routines ingrained in their DNA, everyone does make stupid mistakes every once in a while.

Dread Pirate Roberts is a good example of 99.9% doing a good job of hiding his identity but one f*up at the very beginning before he was serious undermined everything afterwards.

https://www.cnn.com/2013/10/04/world/americas/silk-road-ross...

Re: Manafort Left an Incriminating Paper Trail Converting PDFs to Word

#42

Post by selectodude »

jacquesm wrote: post #33
lovefromatx wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Different context but Buffett's quote “If a cop follows you for 500 miles, you’re going to get a ticket,” applies here. If you are a criminal you don't violate only one law. You tend to violate multiple laws and at some point you are going to be sloppy.

Buffet's quote applies to non-criminals as well.

yes, that was the original point that was being made by Buffett.

Re: Manafort Left an Incriminating Paper Trail Converting PDFs to Word

#43

Post by staunch »

This is an example of bad technology failing its user.

These programs should protect user privacy by stripping identifying information by default, allowing the user the option to preserve it.

All technology should protect its users by default, otherwise everyone is at risk, not just the bad guys.

Re: Manafort Left an Incriminating Paper Trail Converting PDFs to Word

#44

Post by burningion »

delish wrote: post #23
Bucephalus355 wrote: post #3

We all leave huge incriminating paper trails to some extent. This is why privacy is so important, because we’re all committing crimes in theory. That being said Manafort looks very very guilty and his crimes, which are financially based, I think are even more reprehensible in this era of global austerity and low economic growth. Back to the privacy point, we are currently going through NIST 800-53 at work. We only ne…

> Those Enron-esque cross-cut shredders don’t cut it anymore with open source machine learning that can easily reassemble those documents. That's interesting! When I googled for this, I found a few papers, but nothing like a git repository. Do you have more information?

If not, this would make a great blog post idea.

Re: Manafort Left an Incriminating Paper Trail Converting PDFs to Word

#45

Post by mtmail »

raquo wrote: post #28
retSava wrote: post #8

Semi-related tip: I despise protected pdfs with a passion. Especially when you download a datasheet and you can't add annotations or highlights to it. So, how to remove this protection? One way is to print to postscript and convert back to pdf, but then you can't copy text from it. Here's how (on windows): download qpdf ( http://qpdf.sourceforge.net/ ) and run qpdf.exe -decrypt encrypted.pdf woho.pdf I made a small b…

On a Mac I think printing to the built in PDF saver might work?

Didn't work for me. But easy to remove with ghostscript https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/removing-password-from-pdf-on-... (bottom of article)

Re: Manafort Left an Incriminating Paper Trail Converting PDFs to Word

#46

Post by fhrow4484 »

jonbarker wrote: post #39
meaydinli wrote: post #7

All PDF to Word convertors I know are online services. Does that mean these people left copies of their documents on some servers? Those servers could also have timestamped logs of these people's access. If they were so careless with their own documents, if they altered more important ones, does that mean that there are now important documents stored somewhere in a random online pdf-word convertor?

You can actually convert pdf to word in word, it's pretty cool!

right, do people still use online tools these days?

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/edit-pdf-content-in...

Re: Manafort Left an Incriminating Paper Trail Converting PDFs to Word

#48

Post by cpeterso »

makecheck wrote: post #35

The complexity of many file formats is staggering and I try (usually with no success) to convince people to rely only on simpler formats that can be audited easily. Another example: I seem to recall a case awhile back where Word change-tracking contained sensitive information even though “the document” didn’t seem to. Sadly it used to be easy to rely on plain text implicitly but then we made Unicode so complicated th…

Word docs used to contain a UUID of the variety that included the MAC address of the machine that created, allow a doc to be traced back to the machine on which it was created.

http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1999-04-12/entertainment/99...

Re: Manafort Left an Incriminating Paper Trail Converting PDFs to Word

#49

Post by raverbashing »

raquo wrote: post #28
retSava wrote: post #8

Semi-related tip: I despise protected pdfs with a passion. Especially when you download a datasheet and you can't add annotations or highlights to it. So, how to remove this protection? One way is to print to postscript and convert back to pdf, but then you can't copy text from it. Here's how (on windows): download qpdf ( http://qpdf.sourceforge.net/ ) and run qpdf.exe -decrypt encrypted.pdf woho.pdf I made a small b…

On a Mac I think printing to the built in PDF saver might work?

Yes this works

Re: Manafort Left an Incriminating Paper Trail Converting PDFs to Word

#50

Post by JumpCrisscross »

ajross wrote: post #16
socalnate1 wrote: post #2

This is sort of an aside to the article; but it boggles my mind how many people in the business world view PDF's as secure, unalterable documents.

No, Manafort knew what he was doing here, and was doing it for technically sound (albeit legally fraudulent) reasons: Word documents, unlike PDFs[1], store editting history. Manafort knew this, and wanted to evade that tracking. Where he fell down was in the actual conversion step, and in failing to realize that his email to Gates about the conversion were themselves a history of the edit. But his technical instincts…

> Manafort knew what he was doing here

Word has a Document Inspector [1] that cleans up documents’ histories. He had it converted back to a PDF because that’s the format (a) the original document was in and (b) most bank documents are provided as.

[1] https://support.office.com/en-us/article/remove-hidden-data-...

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