Brian Krebs’ Security Fix blog at the Washington Post discusses document security. Anyone who has been a consultant has likely been a victim of information leakage associated with metadata. Most of the time, this is harmless, though possibly embarrassing. Other times, as with some of the incidents Krebs describes, it is worse. I wrote about 29 specific content attributes back in May. Bitform, the company that provided the list, recently released a study of Fortune 100 websites with over 8,000 Microsoft Office files on them. Here are the results:

For detailed descriptions of each of these target elements, get the paper. Btw, the level of diligence assigned to this information is virtually nil – it is taken at face value. Given that it always appears that public incidents involve the government and/or politics, I wouldn’t put it past political operatives to insert bogus information to harm a competitor or foe.