Steganography. concealing secrets

The Son of Man by René Magritte

Steganography is a technique for concealing a file or data inside another ordinary file or data to avoid the detection of supposedly secret data.

Steganography has many used in cyber world as it helps in maintaining Confidentialty (of CIA triads) of data, but has found many uses in harm of digital space also, as malaware developers and other malicious actors use it to conceal malicious codes and software inside unharmful looking softwares and code to avoid detectability and carry out their malicious intents.

In this article, I am going to teach you a simple steganography technique to conceal a .zip file inside any .jpg file using only the command prompt in windows 10.

STEPS (to hide your secrets 😉 )

Step 1. Archive your secret file using WinRAR or similar software into a .zip file.
*( Here I am archiving a text file (top_secret_message.txt) into a .zip file(top_secret.zip))

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Step 2. Copy an .jpg image into the same folder as your .zip file and open cmd inside this folder.

( Here I copied ordinary.jpg into this folder and opened cmd inside this folder)

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To open cmd inside this folder type cmd in the address bar and hit enter.

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Step 3. In cmd enter the command

“ copy /b yourimagefile.jpg + yourarchive.zip newfile.jpg “ and hit enter.

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After this a new .jpg file wil be created which contains inside it the hidden file.

Step 4. Now to open this image file and extract your secret file from it, just open this image file in WinRAR.

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Here you can see you secret file hidden behind an ordinary jpg file.

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This article was originally authored for hackersandcoffee[dot]com on 06 June 2021