Steganography

Steganography is the practice of hiding information usually a message within a image, video, text document or video. This practice has been around for centuries. Messages use to be hidden in painting, pictures, news papers, etc. The allies hid secret codes to the French resistance during World War 2 over the radio. Was sounded like a normal radio news cast had hidden messages for those who knew what to listen for. In the digital age the practice has been update. We are now able to hide messages in data files.

To summarize how steganography works on computer. All computer data is Binary Code, this sentence you are reading why know is a serious of zero’s and one’s that your computer translates into something readable. A program called steghide alters the binary code of an image file and inserts bits of the data you want to hide within a image. I will show you how you can easily hide messages within images.

1) boot up and log into a computer running kali linux

2) You need to install steghide. You can do this by running this

apt-get install steghide

3) Create a .txt file with your message and save it to the desktop. After you do that download an image you want to use to hide your text file in and drag it to the desk top.

4) Next you are going to run this command. It will ask you to create a password because it will encrypt your message.

steghid embed -ef YOURTEXTFILENAME -cf IMAGENAME

I my txt file was called pyi, and my image name was example. Your image will also need its file type extension ie jpg, png, etc

-ef tells steghid what path to use for the data you are hiding in the image

-cf tells steghid what path to use for the image that you are using

5) In order to extract the information from the image you are going to run this command

-steghide —extract -sf IMAGENAME -xf YOURTEXTFILENAME

enter the password and your txt file should show up on the desktop. If you have the original txt file there it will ask you to overwrite it, just click yes.

6) to read you txt file in the termal just run this command

head YOURTEXTFILENAME .txt