When saving Word documents that contain size 1 text to pdf file, extra spaces are added causing DLP to possibly not match

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Issue/Introduction

When saving Word documents that contain size 1 text to pdf file format space characters are added to the size 1 text by the saving process. This may cause DLP to not match text based conditions as DLP is looking for exact matches and will "see" the text and space characters exactly as they are.

The screenshot below shows the saved pdf file with size 1 font at 1,000% zoom. You can see the spaces that were introduced to the text. The original text in the Word document was "bananamonkey" with no spaces.

 

Environment

Any DLP version

Cause

Saving the Microsoft Word document to a pdf file format causes extra spaces to be added to size 1 text. As such, DLP policies may not match on the text that has extra spaces added to it.

Resolution

As the issue is caused by a third-party product and DLP is working by design by detecting the text as it appears, there is not a specific resolution to this issue. However, one possible solution to explore would be to add a regex condition to the policy that could account for the introduced space characters.