

For example, footnotes to text can include additional information not intended for public use. Microsoft Office files offer a rich tool set for collecting private data. The metadata evidence was enough for the court to rule in favor of the plaintiffs, eventually awarding them $20 million and slapping the defendants with millions more in sanctions. olm files (that extension is used for Microsoft Outlook for Mac files). Moreover, defendants were accused of tampering with the time stamp of the last edit in the. The document was created after the lawsuit was brought to court. If a document is printed and is not saved afterwards, the new date of printing would not be saved to the metadata.Īnother proof of document forgery was its date of creation on the corporate server. The time stamp of the last print belongs to app metadata, and it is saved in the document only when the file itself is saved. System metadata showed that the file was last saved before it was last printed, which, as an expert affirmed, could not happen. They claimed it was created for another client before the contract pitch in the United States, and thus it did not violate the former VP’s non-compete agreement with the plaintiff.īut the defendants failed to consider that metadata in their evidence contained a time stamp abnormality. In their defense, the defendant and his new firm provided as evidence a similar commercial offer prepared for a foreign government. The company accused its former VP of misuse of trade secrets, saying that’s how he won the government contract. Shortly after his exit, the firm lost a contract with a government organization to a competitor - a competitor working with the former VP. Venable was contacted by a company whose vice president had recently resigned. A $20 million (doctored) fileĪnother curious metadata-powered eye-opener involved a client of Venable, an American law firm, back in 2015.
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pdf version of the report instead, because it contained less metadata.
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This information raised some flags about the quality, authenticity, and credibility of the report.Īccording to the BBC follow-up story, as a result of noticing the original file’s metadata, the government chose to use the. doc version of the report included metadata on the authors (or, precisely, people who introduced the latest 10 edits). Here’s a classic example of the troubles compromised metadata may bring: the UK government’s 2003 report on Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction. EXIF metadata typical of graphic files also belongs to this category. Embedded metadata might be formulae in Excel cells, hyperlinks, and associated files. System metadata include the name of the author, file name and size, changes, and so forth.ģ. This type of metadata keeps edits introduced by the user, including change logs and comments.Ģ. App metadata is added to the file by the application used to create the document. American law defines three categories of metadata:ġ. Let’s start our deep dive with a bit of theory. Metadata can turn a normal digital document into compromising intel. Today we are talking about something most people don’t know or think much about, metadata - information about a file rather than information shown in a file. Now: Which data breaches are the hardest to prevent? And the answer is, those people don’t know about.


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