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It’s a shame that they obscured incriminating details in the screenshots with simple image operations like low-radius 1- and 2-dimensional blurring. Using a gue
by celoyd 15y ago
It’s a shame that they obscured incriminating details in the screenshots with simple image operations like low-radius 1- and 2-dimensional blurring. Using a guessable point-spread function on an image region with so many known characteristics (because we know the font)
is very, very leaky. In this case it would not surprise me if someone could deconvolve the e-mail addresses enough to match them against EMC employee profiles and such.
If you want to hide text in an image, you should, at minimum, replace every pixel in its bounding box. That still leaves spacing data, but it’s a start. Smearing or lightly jumbling the pixels is barely a notch more secure than rot13.
- biot 15y agoA neat trick would be to overwrite the original details (such as email subject) with something like "Did you really think you could unblur this?" in an identical font. With a security company, whose followers probably enjoy puzzles, you could go a step further and make a game out of it. For example, the unblurred text could contain a URL for a microsite that has a little game related to one of their products. It'd be fun and promotional at the same time. The downside is that this trains people to always try unblurring your blurred text and almost guarantees someone will find the one instance where somebody forgets to blur something.
- celoyd 15y agoHeh, yeah. I was amused by VesselTracker’s strategy. Go to at http://www.vesseltracker.com/en/Ships/Mv.-Deira-9149768.html http://www.vesseltracker.com/en/Ships/Mv.-Deira-9149768.html (for example) and look at the “blurred” pay-only data. Rot13 spoiler: it all says “Ab qngn sbe lbh!”