Nowadays, everyone prefers to have and store digital copies of everything, both crucial and trivial. From important property documents, contracts, wills, business papers, and other papers of high value to everyday bills and receipts, resumés, newsletters, etc, pretty much everything tends to be a PDF document today. Thanks to the various benefits of the PDF file format, a growing number of businesses — big and small — have adapted their processes and workflows to make use of PDFs. Thus, it has become increasingly crucial to ensure the security of these PDF files.
Protecting PDF documents from unauthorized access, modification, or distribution is paramount whether you're a working professional, a student, or any other individual, but especially when you’re a business. For businesses, the stakes are even higher, as proprietary data, client information, financial reports, and other legal documents are often exchanged between multiple parties, and a breach of any kind could result in massive consequences.
In this article, we'll explore five effective methods to add or improve PDF security, each with unique benefits.
1. Trust your PDF Software
Imagine adding multiple locks and deadbolts to the main door of a house for your protection while ignoring the integrity of the rest of the house. This is essentially what happens when you use a random free online PDF editor. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of free websites that offer PDF tools. In most cases, there is no information about who’s running these websites and how your data is used for malicious purposes. While you can enjoy their free tools, you risk compromising the sensitive or confidential data in your PDF files. Not to mention, such websites are almost always riddled with ads and have a cumbersome user interface.
Instead, you can always rely upon PDF Expert — a beautifully designed, feature-rich, and award-winning PDF app for Mac, iPhone, and iPad that is trusted by over 30 million people around the globe, including teams at businesses like Toyota, Mercedes-Benz, and Sony Pictures. It comes from the house of Readdle, known for its suite of other award-winning productivity apps such as Documents, Spark, Calendars, Scanner Pro, and Fluix.
2. Add Password Protection
One of the most fundamental ways to secure a PDF file is by implementing password protection on the file. By setting a strong, unique password, you can restrict access to your document, ensuring that only authorized individuals can open and view the contents. This method is particularly useful for sensitive documents, such as financial reports, legal contracts, or personal information, as it provides a layer of control over who can access the file.
Learn how to protect a PDF document and secure its contents by creating an encrypted PDF. It is also crucial to ensure that you are using a strong password that is not only difficult to guess via social engineering but is also long and complex enough to protect the file from automated bots that brute force their way in.
3. Redact Sensitive Information
Often, you’ll want to share with others PDFs that contain sensitive information like financial or accounting numbers, social security data, or private details. Just like you can strike out or scribble over something on a piece of paper in the real world, PDFs allow you to redact sensitive information and protect it from prying eyes. A good PDF manager app like PDF Expert offers a plethora of essential tools that help you redact information in PDF files.
Not only can you black out selected text in a PDF file, essentially adding a black rectangle over sensitive information, but you can also completely erase text or other information from a PDF file using PDF Expert.
What’s more, PDF Expert makes this manual task easy for you by giving you the ability to redact or erase multiple or all instances of a word or phrase in the entire PDF file. For example, you may have an audit report of a particular company that you want to share with someone as a reference without revealing that company’s name. You can use the Find & Redact tool in PDF Expert and automatically hide this sensitive information from the PDF. Download PDF Expert and start creating PDF secured documents today!
4. Save PDFs as Flattened
Any modifications or changes you make to a PDF file, such as adding annotations, stamps, or signatures, are saved as separate layers so that in the event you’d like to make any further changes, they can be done without affecting the original contents of the PDF file. The very nature of this ability also means that these additions can easily be removed by anyone with whom you share the file. To prevent this from happening, you should export and save the file as Flattened.
Saving a file as flattened exports all the active elements into a single layer so that they are no longer available for unwanted or malicious modifications. Thus, all the annotations or other elements added to the file become attached to it and stay intact when sharing.
5. Share PDFs via Trusted Channels
To maintain the security of PDF documents, it's crucial to share them only through trusted channels. This means using secure file transfer protocols, encrypted email services, or reputable cloud storage platforms with robust access controls. You should avoid distributing or sharing sensitive PDFs via public or unsecured Wi-Fi networks and be cautious about publicly sharing links to these documents on social media or forums.
As a rule of thumb, always assume that any publicly accessible link to a PDF file can and will be accessed by someone it wasn’t meant for, so ensure you know how to send secure PDF documents. Always encrypt the file by adding password protection and redacting any confidential information. Limiting distribution to verified, secure channels significantly reduces the risk of unauthorized or malicious access to your PDF files.
Implementing these five security measures can significantly enhance the protection of your PDF files, safeguarding your sensitive information and giving you greater control over their distribution and use.
Download PDF Expert to get access to all the essential tools and features you need to work with PDF files.