Before we go into the deep and study what digital steganography is and what we can do with it, we need to look at the beginning of sealing.
The term steganography comes from the Greek words στεγνος + γραφία, as the history of steganography begins further back and from the time of Da Vinci.
The purpose of steganography is to send a message which will be hidden inside some object material or immaterial, for the purpose of concealing it.
The need for the creation of the seal was invented to serve primarily war purposes, as the spies of the countries had to communicate with complete secrecy and security as they were handling sensitive files. Now, classical sealing has become obsolete and digital sealing has taken its place.
The point is, is digital signage a defense and privacy tool or a Trojan Horse of malicious users?
Digital steganography: What is digital steganography?
Digital signage is the data encryption technique in which some data is hidden behind other data to protect the sender's message.
Digital steganography: How does digital steganography work?
A message can be hidden behind any digital object, be it a text file (.txt, .docx), or key activation.
The most common data transfer 'containers' used by stenographers are image files, audio files, video files, etc.
Modern signage has appeared in the world of 1985 with the development of personal computers.
Since then, the evolution of signage has evolved very slowly, but steadily and surely, as now a message can be hidden:
- On the smaller Bits of the large images
- Behind encrypted data or random data
- In an audio file
- In video
- In Texts (.txt, .docx Files, In Sealing Blog).
In most cases, the information is hidden in pixels and extracted with special tools.
In order to do this, many modern writers often program specially designed codes.
The dangers of digital shorthand
Digital steganography, as mentioned earlier, is simply a series of methods that hides information and can have many properties, such as Watermarks on photos to prevent theft of these images and to ensure the protection of personal data.
One of the simplest ways to hide malware is to use duplicate extensions. A file will be named for example as "sea.jpg.exe".
When you click on it, the Windows they will only look at the last part of the extension and therefore it will be treated as executable. For an unprotected computer, this method is particularly effective, but luckily now with the antivirus, the attacks have dropped dramatically.
As mentioned earlier, text can be embedded in images. This can take the form of malicious code.
Although it won't be able to cause you damage because your computer scans the files, there are several computers that avoid scanning the files and run it immediately after downloading it.
