Steganography and You

Hey, hey, hey, look who’s back! Harry N. Hacker here. The boss and Anne are on vacation this week, so I’m going to tell you about my favorite subject. It just happens to be my specialty… steganography. That’s right. Steganography is the art or act of inserting text into pictures or .jpg files in computer talk. It may also be called writing secret messages or encoding messages in photos for concealment.

There are quite a few programs available for this process which may be used on Windows and Linux formats. The programs are free downloads, and have various features, like: hiding typed text in images, hiding TXT or other files like DOCX, XLSX, ZIP, RAR. The supported input cover formats include: JPG, BMP, GIF, PGN, TIF files. Some of these programs even let me hide data in MP3, WAV, and other media formats. I can encrypt and decrypt data using passwords; you know how much I like passwords.

I’ve used Steghide which is free and easy to use, and lets me hide sensitive data in many types of images, and the color of the original doesn’t change. Back in the day, when I first started using these techniques, if Snoop the Detective was able to obtain a copy of the original photo, and had a really good eye for details, old Snoop could see the difference in the picture. When he ran the pic against Steghide, it would crack and reveal my secret message.

Steghide is a command line tool which means that syntax care must be used or I can really mess things up. Not to say “I” would mess anything up, (I’m just sayin’). You can check out this website for more information:

35 Best Free Steganography Software For Windows. (2015). Retrieved May 12, 2016, from http://listoffreeware.com/list-of-best-free-steganography-software-for-windows/

JPHIDE and JPSEEK are two programs which were used in the Computer Forensics class during the Rhino Hunt. Both programs were run on Linux virtual machines to keep the files from possible contamination, and to keep the host machine from the same. During the “investigation” pictures were found on the hard disk image, and JPSEEK was used to carve the pictures and reveal the hidden message.

The basic process (if I remember correctly) was to take the file, compare it to the MD5 hash to ensure the file was the right or same file, stego and jphide were used to find the password and carve. It was a pretty detailed task, and I was an amateur at the time. I’ve been told by my lawyer that if I reveal my traits, I will spend an abundant amount of time wearing strips. So if you want to find out more on this subject, Google steganography tools and study up. Use this website for JPHIDE, and JPSEEK:

STEGANOGRAPHY. (n.d.). Retrieved May 12, 2016, from ttp://linux01.gwdg.de/~alatham/stego.html

OOPS, here comes the boss. Oh, ya, I lied. I just snuck in here. Gotta go. “Happy Researching”

Have fun with Steganography. Oh, and when you hide your message in a picture, find one with a lot of detail in it. Something like a rain forest scene. The more detail in the photo, the harder it is for the naked eye to detect any change from the original. See ya!