Paper shredders are cool…
Except they don’t really prevent confidential data from being read… they merely slow down the inevitable.

You’ve seen it in spy and thriller movies (or even Korean dramas HAH)…
Someone gets hold of a bag of shreddings, then they spend sleepless nights reassembling a document…

And that’s what we get to do too! > See activity here <.

So what would my tips for reassembling paper shreddings?
Luck. Lots of luck. Especially if there are multiple sheets.

Otherwise…

Find common word patterns.
For example, dates, website addresses, images, shapes… Those sort of things.

Dates and URL addresses can be very useful if the shredded document was a published article
Although… if it was published then it wasn’t shredded for confidential reasons…

If that were the case, we could stop trying to piece back the document, and just find the original document!

That being said, the date on the shredded document (21/02/2018) doesn’t match the actual article’s date (18/01/2017).
But the date might have just been the printer’s header data

So after piecing just a few shreds together, I was able to identify the keywords Trump, www.betootaadvocate.com, world-news, and Juan (who would’ve been the author of the article).

Throw that into google, and voila we’ve got a match!
The Betoota Advocate: Trump Requests All Security Briefings Be Kept To 140 Characters Or Less

Even if a site was taken down, it might’ve been archived or kept by Google’s cache.

So how would you effectively ‘shred’ a document?
Perhaps maybe the answer lies not in shredding the documents, but destroying it in different manners.

  • Coat the document in ink/bleach/etc, so that the important data is effectively ruined.
  • KILL IT WITH FIRE
  • Make a paper mache instead :)

If you absolutely, had to shred the document - I would recommend a few things:

  • re-shred the document
    It will make the documents harder to reassemble when there are more pieces.
    Yes, like I mentioned before, it will merely slow down the inevitable.
    But time is precious - and the more time something requires to solve, the higher the chance that it won’t be solved.

  • Combine shreddings
    Shred multiple documents together. It will make anyone’s life painfully difficult.

  • Split the shreddings
    Distribute the shreddings into several waste bins - This way, in order to piece back the document, you would need to collect all the pieces.

Or… why not do everything!