This application makes even the most graphic PDF or Word Doc files safe to open

Word documents, and Even PDF files are not necessarily secure. These usually harmless files can be injected Symbol of malicious “poison”. Or simple scripts It can pose a serious security risk.

You probably already know that it is dangerous to open files from sources that you cannot necessarily trust. If you’re an activist or journalist — or anyone who sometimes relies on anonymous tips to do their work — you may encounter a situation where there’s potentially useful information inside a Microsoft Word document or PDF file that you can’t quite vouch for. Wouldn’t it be great if you could open and read these files without exposing your device to potential security risks?

Danger zone It is a free and open source tool designed for this purpose. It was originally built by a journalist and security engineer Mika LeeThis application opens files in an isolated test environment without Internet access, then converts the file to an image-based PDF without scripting enabled. The resulting PDF contains any malicious code removed and should be safe to open – at least as safe as possible.

“You can think of it like printing a document and then re-scanning it to remove anything that’s unclear, except whatever is done in the software,” he explains. About pageWhich includes a lot of great details about how the app works.

To start, Download and install Dangerzone. There are downloads for Windows, macOS, and various Linux systems. The first time you run it, there will be a short setup, and then you can simply drag the files into the window.

Photo: Justin Bott

The application can open and convert PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Open Office, EPUB, and image files. You can drag and drop multiple documents at once, if you wish.

After adding documents, you’ll be asked a few questions: where you want the resulting files to end up, whether they should be opened after the conversion is finished, and whether you want to use optical character recognition (OCR) to make the document searchable. You can also move original documents that may be unsafe to a subfolder named “Unsafe,” which helps ensure they are not confused with newly created secure documents.

Photo: Justin Bott