28th November 2022, Kathmandu
Technology has evolved throughout generations. But like two sides of a coin, the pros come with cons. Are you familiar with the term ‘steganography’?
The art of hiding secret encoded messages and texts within images and videos might not be that new to you.
From using morse code to communicate to attacking someone’s PC through Steganography, we are getting more advanced.
Still don’t get the complete picture? Let’s learn it in simple terms.
Why Steganography is important:
Steganography originates from the word staganos, meaning ‘covered, ‘concealed’, and graphein meaning writing.
This means you can pass any message covering it with something else (images and videos) and no one would know! Then why is this not illegal, you might ask? Well, this comes in handy to individuals in law enforcement, intelligence, and military communities.
Even before technology was as big as it is now, soldiers used to communicate through secret codes.
So why not now, when there is literally nothing that can’t be done with technology? Steganography is mainly classified into:
- Masking and filtering
- Algorithms and transformation
- Least significant bit (LSB) insertion method
You might think this is dangerous too. Yes, it is. This is why you also need to know about steganalysis.
Steganalysis:
Steganalysis is the method of detecting hidden information using various tools. The different approaches of steganalysis include visual attacks, structural attacks, and statistical attacks. You can use this method to detect any malicious malware, virus, or JavaScripts hidden using cover objects (text, audio, video).
The term “attack” might be confusing you, well, we are attacking the harmful messages here. Steganalysis itself is a method a tech enthusiast should learn if they want to detect and decrypt these messages. You can do the following to ensure it:
- Analysis of images visually, and trying to find the visual difference between bit images
- Identifying the structural changes someone might have done to reduce the number of colors in palette-based steganography
- Statistical analysis through mathematical formulas of the images
“But I am not a tech geek, now what?”:
Fret not, we got your back. Even if you are not well-versed in the tech language, you can prevent steganography attacks.
Since these attacks happen mainly through text, images, sound, video, etc, you should simply not download them.
Well, don’t even click on any suspicious-looking links. Use anti-malware tools and these days you can even download steganography tools like StegDetect that can detect steganography in images.
Steganography will be bigger in the future!
This is only the beginning. With time, we might see more dangerous steganography attacks in the future as hiding the entire existence if the information has become easier.
Think twice, and think thrice before you click on anything that you aren’t sure, is secure. With this, you have become a bit more tech aware than you were before reading this article.
So we sure expect safer PCs and happy tech-blog readers!