There have been two recent cases of U.S. Military negligence when operating the Adobe Acrobat suite for creation of PDF files. One such incident ocurred in a report released from Iraq about an Italian agent named Nicola Calipari who was killed by the U.S. Military at checkpoint whilst attempting to rescue an Italian journalist. The PDF document contained both sensitive and unclassified information, the former of which was covered with black boxes. Merely covering the data is not enough however as a user can just select the text in Adobe Acrobat and copy & paste it into a text document/application.
An alleged English crackers (hacker for the non-technical) case file was recently presented on the web by the military with, once again, classified text covered with black boxes. In this instance they are IP addresses of military computers, which Gary McKinnon apparently attacked. You can see the IP addresses below along with an example PNG demonstrating how easily this “security” can be overcome. The U.S. Military are currently seeking his extradition to face an American court.
IP Address Location
160.145.18.111 Fort Myer, VA 160.145.30.89 Fort Myer, VA 160.145.33.52 Fort Myer, VA 160.145.40.22 Fort Myer, VA 160.145.40.31 Fort Myer, VA 160.145.40.51 Fort Myer, VA 160.145.214.25 Fort McNair, Washington, DC
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/internet/security/0,39020375,39197313,00.htm
[http://www.spy.org.uk/freegary/archives/2005/06/the\_indictment.html#more](http://www.spy.org.uk/freegary/archives/2005/06/the_indictment.html#more)
[http://www.boingboing.net/2005/06/08/uk\_superhacker\_who\_0.html](http://www.boingboing.net/2005/06/08/uk_superhacker_who_0.html)
http://news.findlaw.com/hdocs/docs/cyberlaw/usmck1102vaind.pdf