6 Security Risks With PDF Metadata & How to Mitigate Them

Metadata often includes information such as a document’s author, creation date, and modification history. Since this information can be extracted by people with malicious intent, you’ll need to take a few precautions while using PDF documents in your organization. Here, we explore the dangers associated with unaltered PDF metadata and provide strategies that can mitigate these risks.

Understanding (and Avoiding) Metadata Security Risks

PDF security is a common blind spot for organizations—even those that are aware of the risks involved. In 2021, an analysis of 39,664 PDF documents from 75 security agencies found that just seven of these agencies sanitized their PDFs before publishing them.

If your organization doesn’t pay attention to this situation and take action to prevent these dangers, it could face the risk of metadata misuse. Unedited metadata can create problems like:

1. Exposure of Sensitive Information

Metadata can reveal sensitive information about a document’s origin, authorship, and history. This data can be exploited by cybercriminals who want to target specific people or gain insight into your organization as a whole.

Mitigation Strategy: Regularly audit PDFs and clean their metadata before sharing them externally. Use specialized PDF tools to remove or edit metadata, ensuring that only necessary information is retained.

2. Evidence of Document Changes

The modification history stored in metadata can help people track changes throughout a document’s evolution. Unfortunately, that could include changes that were never intended to be public knowledge.

Mitigation Strategy: Utilize PDF tools that allow you to flatten or sanitize documents, removing any trace of previous edits. That ensures your document’s history will remain private.

3. Increased Vulnerability to Cyber Attacks

Metadata may contain information about the software and systems used to create a document. Hackers with access to this info could exploit it to launch targeted attacks.

Mitigation Strategy: Regularly update your PDF software to keep it as secure as possible. Additionally, use security-focused editing tools that employ encryption to prevent your files from getting into the wrong hands.

4. Intellectual Property Risks

Metadata can also reveal proprietary information or intellectual property (IP)-related details that should remain confidential. If this information is exposed, it could spell trouble for your IP.

Mitigation Strategy: Use encryption and password protection features to secure PDFs. This adds another layer of security, helping you protect your IP as effectively as possible.

5. Reputational Damage

When sensitive metadata is leaked, it can damage an organization’s reputation. Your organization could suffer from a loss of trust and monetary repercussions in the form of regulatory fines after a metadata leak.

Mitigation Strategy: Motivate employees to take metadata risk management seriously by educating them about the importance of metadata security. Along with that, take time to sanitize metadata in shared documents.

6. Loss of Competitive Advantage

Competitors can exploit metadata to gain insights into an organization’s strategies or upcoming projects. With this knowledge, they could take steps to undermine your plans.

Mitigation Strategy: Make a point of reviewing and editing/removing metadata in strategic documents. By doing so, you can ensure your competitive information will remain confidential.

How Smallpdf Improves PDF Security

To keep your PDF documents secure and reduce your metadata risk level, use Smallpdf tools like:

• Edit PDF. With our Edit PDF feature, you can add highlighting, shapes, and more to your documents. Since Smallpdf adheres to the European General Data Protection Regulation, is ISO/IEC 27001-certified, and uses TLS encryption while processing files, you won’t have to worry about data security when editing PDFs online.
• Redact PDF. Metadata isn’t the only part of a PDF that can contain sensitive information. Our Redact PDF tool can help you permanently remove this information from your documents.
• Watermark PDF. Do you need to protect PDFs from unauthorized distribution? Use Smallpdf’s Watermark PDF feature to add a text watermark to your document in moments.
• Flatten PDF. If you’re wondering how to hide metadata in PDF documents, our Flatten PDF feature can help. In addition to making PDF contents uneditable and reducing file sizes, flattening PDFs can remove metadata from documents.
• Protect PDF. Keep your PDFs as secure as possible by encrypting and password-protecting these documents with our Protect PDF tool.

The Edit PDF tool in action

Conclusion

There’s no denying the fact that unaltered PDFs can create significant metadata security risks. However, you can protect your organization from potential threats by understanding these dangers, implementing enterprise class metadata management strategies, and using Smallpdf’s suite of tools.

Answering FAQs About PDF Metadata Security

Is metadata a security risk?

Metadata is not inherently a security risk, but it can become one due to data mismanagement. If you don’t remove or edit your metadata, your organization could suffer from sensitive information leaks, increased susceptibility to cyberattacks, and other issues.

How do you anonymize metadata?

There are a few strategies companies can use to anonymize metadata in their PDFs. These strategies include flattening PDFs and manually editing/deleting metadata.

How do I permanently hide information on a PDF?

If you want to hide information stored in a PDF document permanently, Smallpdf’s Redact PDF tool can help. Otherwise, you can use the Flatten PDF tool to remove metadata from your files.