Skip to main content

How to remove hidden sensitive information from word documents?

While creating a Word document, it also creates hidden personal information called Meta data in your document. This hidden personal information includes your name and initials, computer name, name of the hard disk or network server where you saved the document, previous author’s name, things you deleted from the documents and other hidden text and tracking comments. Anyone can easily find it out these data. So for security reasons, you wouldn’t want to share these data with others. This is important especially when you send these documents electronically.

You may remember my previous post about removing Meta data which is a MS Office add-in from Microsoft. Here is an individual program, which I think much better for removing Meta data from MS word 97/200/XP and 2003.

DocScrubber a free tool from Javacoolsoftware that analyze your word document (multiple documents also) and remove hidden or potentially embarrassing data from your documents. Moreover, it can also produce an analysis of any Word document to show what metadata it contains.

Using this application is also quite simple. Download (820Kb) and install it. Run the program. If you want to analyze the Meta data from a document before deleting it, just click on “Analyze’ tab and select a document. Click ‘Next’ and it will show what hidden data your word document includes.

To remove Meta data, click on “Scrub” tab from the main window, select an option (single document or multiple document) and select the document you want to scrub. Click Next and select what you want to delete from you document and click ‘Next’ for completing the task.

Comments

  1. hi, nice blog
    Your Blog is More interesting.great work.:)
    moreover, ...if possible at ur free time visit mine..and give ur suggestion to improve..
    if possible add me in your blog roll. i will return my favour!!

    ReplyDelete
  2. very nice explanation on how to remove metadata from word documents.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Please leave your valuable comment below

Popular posts from this blog

Surf the Web Anonymously With Firefox Add-on Phproxy

There are several web based proxy servers available to surf the internet anonymously or as from another country. The Firefox add-on (Firefox 3 – 4) Phzilla helps you view a webpage or surf the internet using the PHProxy (a type of web based proxy server) proxy servers. It is very easy and convenient to use.

Restore Lost Capacity Of Your USB Flash Drive (How to)

Some malware can hide full capacity of your USB flash drive. For example, a 4GB pen drive sometimes shows only 500kb or less. An interesting part of this situation is that, even after removing the malware or formatting the USB flash drive, you will not get back its original capacity. Therefore, the question here is how to restore a USB flash drive to its full capacity.

Disable automatic Meta refresh/redirect of websites in browser for security reasons[how to]

Generally speaking, Meta refresh is a method used by some websites to instruct a web browser to automatically refresh/redirect the current web page after a given time interval. You can see this type of refresh/redirect especially in media sites. This is some times annoying or can be used for malicious purposes by redirecting you to a malicious site. If you don’t like this feature, you can disable this in your browser. Here is how to disable this in Internet Explore/Chrome, Firefox and Opera. Internet Explorer: Go to Tools - Internet options - Security tab - Custom Level button - Miscellaneous category - set "Allow Meta refresh" to Disable. Firefox: Go to Tools - Options - Advanced - General - Accessibility and tick the option next to ‘Warn me when web sites try to redirect or reload the page’. Alternatively you can use extension RefreshBlocker . Opera: Go to Preferences - Advanced - Network and uncheck "Enable automatic redirection".