**2. Information's concealment**

Steganography can hide code in plain text, such as inside an image file. This means that messages or information can be hidden inside a nonconfidential text as a carrier of these messages and information. In this way, malicious parties use this technology to compromise devices by hosting an image on a website or sending a picture in an e-mail. Hidden data or a carrier file does not have to be images; in fact that digital images are just streams of bytes like any other file making them an especially effective way to hide secret text and other data [4].

The science of steganography is a form of obfuscation that is very different from cryptography, which is the practice of writing encrypted or encrypted messages. The encrypted messages are clearly hiding something: and require specialized decryption methods.

Steganographic letters are similar to conventional letters, but they cleverly hide something unexpected. For instance, consider the following statement: (He eats solely like Lucifer, what other rogue enjoys Durian!). We can determine the core notion behind how to obscure information by reading this communication using a known technique. The hidden message, "Hello, world," is not encrypted; the reader only needs to know how to interpret the message in a specific way to identify it, and we did

## *Malware: Detection and Defense DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.108434*

not just have to add any extra data to the "carrier" in order to deliver it. Although the technique of hiding the data is far more complex, it is essentially the same concept on a reduced scale.

The mind is interpreting the secret message in plain language in the preceding example. However, computer algorithms read bytes rather than natural words. It turns out that this allows you to hide communications in plain text that are simple for algorithms to perform and evaluate while being nearly hard for humans to uncover without assistance. Indeed, due to the nature of photographic file formats, it is feasible to conceal not just text strings but also complete files in .jpg format and other image formats depending on the technology employed; this may also be accomplished without increasing the overall file size for the original image.
