**4. Steganography hides information**

Take a look at a few of the most basic methods for hiding text in a digital image. One straightforward method is to simply insert the material into the file at the end. These works do not prohibit the photograph from being displayed regularly, nor do they alter its esthetic look. We merely put "hello world" to the file's conclusion. The hex dump output shows us putting the extra bytes.

A program can easily read or discard the plain text string. In this scenario, we'll invert the hexadecimal number and output it in plain English using a software. For example, a received image displays a picture in a photograph viewer application ordinarily, but when examined with the WinRaR archiving utility, we can find that the unpacked.jpg file contains a concealed 28-byte text file.

These types of basic approaches can be helpful in collecting user data, but they do have some disadvantages. First, they inflate the file size, and second, they change the file hash. It's still very convenient for security tools to spot because of its unexpected format.

The best way is to enter into the code at the binary stage and deal with the least important bits (LSBs) of each pixel. Pixels can be represented in a 3-byte color image, one per RGB each (red, green, blue). Suppose we have three bytes


#### **Figure 1.**

representing a particular color as seen in **Figure 1**. You should swap the last four bits of the orange code with the first four bits of the turquoise code, to produce the composite RGB [5].

If we write software to read and extract these last four bits separately, we have effectively hidden the purple signal within the orange color software. Two pixels for the price of one, as there is no increase in file size. We can send our cryptic information without doubling the bandwidth of the actual message or modifying the file format, thus simple detection approaches that rely on examining files to find them are rendered obsolete. In actuality, the code is extremely cluttered before the attacker reassembles it.

In a sense, this ensures that an intrusion will utilize the last four bits of encoding RGB values to write extra information without interfering with the image's graphic display or increasing the file size. Another program will then read the hidden data and use it to reassemble a malicious script or sort customer data.

LSB processing is one of several steganography processes. There are numerous other instances in which photographs and other file formats might be modified to conceal a concealed message. To relay secret communications, the attackers employed information buried in network protocols, a technique known as "network hiding." The approach is the same in both cases: hide in clear view by downloading an invisible message to the accessible carrier.

Steganography for shielding information has affected both Windows and Mac OS operating systems. An intruder has been found to use cryptography to conceal portions of the ransomware attack code, add malicious JavaScript, and even download encryption software.
