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DEVONthink and the ABBYY Data Leak

August 29, 2018 — Eric Böhnisch-Volkmann

According to TechCrunch, ABBYY, the maker of the OCR technology we use in DEVONthink Pro Office, had accidentally exposed more than 200,000 OCRed customer documents.

This leak, however, does not affect you as our customer. All documents are processed locally on your Mac by the ABBYY OCR engine. Your documents only leave your computer when you manually export or send them, or when you synchronize them to a remote location.

However, our sync stores are fully AES 256 bit encrypted when you set up the synchronization with an encryption key. If you haven’t done so (you can check in the sync settings) and you sync your databases through a service out of your control, like iCloud, Dropbox, or a WebDAV service, you might want to remove your sync store and create a new one with an appropriately strong encryption key.