The art and science of hiding information by embedding messages within other, seemingly harmless messages is known as steganography. Today, we will learn some basics of steganography and how to do it on computers.{ Note : This post is only for educational purposes. Please don't use this technique for wrong purposes }
By the use of Steganography you can hide one type of file behind other keeping the format of
file same.
{ NOTE:- The files and folder names I am going to use are just for reference. You may use different if you want to. But for beginning I would suggest to follow along. Later on you can try it with different file names. }
Setup:-
1) Create a new folder named test in any drive (say C: Drive).
2) In the test folder, Create a text file in it named – abc.txt. Type anything you want to in the Text file.
3) Copy any picture say – xyz.jpg in the test folder.
Now the game begins.
1) Open command prompt on your computer. (Press 'Window+R', type 'cmd' & press 'Enter' key)
2) Open the test folder in command prompt. You may use the following commands to do that :
2.1) cd/
2.2) cd test
3) Now use the following command : COPY /B xyz.jpg+abc.txt new.jpg
(i.e. the syntax is : Copy /B name of file in which you want to embedded the content+ name of file which you want to embedded name of new file.)
• Open the test folder and you will see a new image named new.jpg.
• When you preview it you will see the normal image but now right click it and open the image with
notepad. At the end of the file you can see the text that you wrote in the document.
Well this was just the beginning. Now the more interesting use of it.
If you want to bind rar files to images. You can do that as well. (You may put anything you want in the rar file).
Its procedure is given as below :
• Create a new folder anywhere in your system. For example: "C:\test".
• Select all files you want to hide and get them zipped using WinZip or WinRar.
• Let this file is 'data.rar'.
• Select an image file like 'ppp.jpg' in which you want to hide your 'data.rar'.
• Place both 'ppp.jpg' and 'womb.rar' into the folder you created.
• Open command prompt (press 'Window+R', type 'cmd' & press 'Enter' key).
• In Command Prompt window, navigate to the folder where you placed both 'ppp.jpg' & 'womb.rar' files. Just type "cd folder-path". In this case : cd C:\test in Command Prompt.
• Type following command very carefully in Command Prompt:
copy /b ppp.jpg+data.rar ppp.jpg
• Well done! If everything went good, 'womb.rar' (contains all those files you want to hide) has been hidden in the 'ppp.jpg' (image file you selected).
Now, How to access your hidden data :
• Realize that 'ppp.jpg' is a JPEG extension file. Hence its properties will remain same. It'll work like any other JPEG image file. But your data 'womb.rar' is still hidden within it.
• Now there are two file extraction methods:
♦ Method 1: Simply right-click 'ppp.jpg' and select 'open with winrar'. You (or anyone you send the file to) can see 'womb.rar' zipped file there. Just unzip it and here your all files are.
♦ Method 2: Change the extension from 'ppp.jpg' to 'ppp.rar'. Then, double-click to open it. You can see 'womb.rar' zipped file there. Just unzip it, and here your all files are.
Hope you enjoyed this post. Let us know if u had any problem in trying this technique.
