Use images to Conceal your files- A Simple Steganography technique

Can you see anything special in this picture?   Watch carefully. If I say this image consists of another three images and many more, can you believe? Open your eyes and inspect element by element. Can’t find anything? Then do one thing. Right click on the image and save it to your computer. Now the image will be saved as test.jpg. Just rename it as test.zip and unzip..What you can see?. Two more images, a text file , a Word document and Music file !!. Means all these things are concealed in a single image without any signs. This is an example of Steganography .

Steganography.

Steganography is a technique to conceal an information or a message inside an Image. Digital image is  is a flexible medium used to carry secret information because the minor modification of a cover picture is not easily distinguishable.This is not a new technique. To know more about Steganography go through this Wiki article. Steganography techniques are extensively utilized by spy workers and terrorist groups to pass secret messages.  Several free as well as premium steganography applications are available in market.

A Simple Steganography technique without any tools or software

Here you can see a simple steganography technique without using any software. The above mentioned example utilized the same method.

Create a folder in your PCs  local drives. Here I am creating a folder named “test” in “D” Drive and copy your image to that folder

Create a Zip File with the files required to be compressed and rename it as tezt.zip (You can use file compression utilities like Win RAR). Here I am adding two images , a text file, a document file and music file.

Move this zip file to the folder “Test” which we have created in the first step. Now your test folder contains two files one test.jpg and test.zip

Go to Command Prompt  (Start > Run> CMD in XP  and Start > CMD in Win 7) and type D: (For going to the root of D Drive) then go to our test folder by typing CD Test

Now type the following command

copy /b test.jpg + test.zip test.jpg

Now you will get a message “1 File copied as shown in the figure” . Now your test.zip is embedded in the test.jpg image file. Check the size of image for verification.

Now coming to the application part . Just an example from many.  If you want to email an executable program file to your friend. Normally you will not be able to send executable files through email. Through this technique you can send the files by using this technique. What you think? Share your ideas.

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