How to Hide Secret Files in Plain Sight

How to Hide Secret Files in Plain Sight Steganography is the art of hiding messages in plain sight in a way that no one except the recipient knows that it’s there. Though it’s become more popular in the digital age, one of its previous more popular uses was to hide messages and songs when they were played backwards. So in this video, I'm going to show you a few ways to secretly hide your files in plain sight. First, we’ll look at hiding files inside a Microsoft Office Documents. The idea behind this is pretty simple. If you were to run a DOCX document through an archiving program and extract it, you’d find that it already has files and folders hidden within it. So, what we’re doing is just adding stuff to this folder and then re-zipping it and labeling it as a document again. When I tried doing this on my own, I couldn’t get it to work. It kept giving me this here. So, I found a program on irongeek.com that automates this process for you. Just open up the program, select the covered document and then select the file that you want to hide within it. And it will create another file in the covered documents folder that begins with the word steno. Some things to note about this program is that I had several issues using various file formats, but text files seemed to work the best. Also, if you would want to change anything in the covered document and resave it, the hidden file will be lost. Now to extract the file, all you have to do is rerun it through an archiving program such as seven zip and you should see the file within the document known as Less Significant Bit or LSB Steganography. The second method allows you to hide files inside pictures. The first way to accomplish this is through the command line. First, make sure that you have your picture and file in the same folder, then go to Start, Run and type in CMD. Now, navigate to the folder that has your files by using this CD command and type in Copy, space, Forward/b, space, the name of your picture, space, plus, space, the name of your file, space, the name of a new picture. Once you hit Enter, you should have a new picture in your folder that has the file embedded in it. Now, you can send this picture to a friend or upload it to Flickr. To retrieve the file from the pictures simply change the extension to that of the hidden file and then double click on it. Another possibly easier option for this would be the download to hide in picture program from this website. Then just open up a bitmap in and then select the file to hide inside it. Then it prompts you to password protected for extra security then just click Save. The only drawback with this is that you have to have this program in order to extract the file as well. This last method hides messages in plain Unicode text. The program to do this is also developed by Iron Geek and you can download it from here at this site. Once you have the programs extracted, double click on—in the top box, you can type in a small message, then type in a regular sentence in the next box, then clicking code in the bottom box would output the new sentence with your secret message embedded in it. Now, you can post it in programs like Twitter and no one will suspect it’s hiding a secret message. If you want to test this out, yesterday I posted a sample tweet for all my Twitter followers to decode. All you have to do to extract the hidden message is copy it into the input box of this program and click Decode to get the message. Have fun sending secret messages to your friends and if you know of any other cool Steganography tricks, please leave them in the comments below. Be sure to check out tinkernut.com on Facebook and Twitter. That’s it for this tutorial from—tinkernut.com.