How to Hide a File in an Image: Steganography for Beginners

If, like me, privacy and data security are important to you in the modern digital age, then I will show you one interesting way to protect information – steganography, the art of hiding files inside images. Thanks to this method, you can transfer data secretly from strangers.

In this post, I will tell you how to quickly hide a file in an image using the built-in tools of the operating system, without the need to install additional programs. Whether you’re a Windows or Linux user, this step-by-step guide will help you master this useful skill.

Step 1: Create an archive

1. Gather all the files you want to hide into one folder.
2. Create an archive from these files. Let the archive be called files.zip .

For Windows:

1. Select the files you want to add to the archive.
2. Right-click on the highlighted files.
3. Select “Send” -> “Compressed ZIP Folder”.

For Linux:

1. Open a terminal and navigate to your files folder using the command cd /path/to/folder .
2. Use the zip command to create an archive: zip -r files.zip .

Step 2: Hiding the archive in the image

For Windows:

1. Prepare an image (eg img.jpg ) and archive (eg files.zip ).
2. Make sure both files are in the same folder.
3. Open a command prompt. To do this, press the key combination Win + R , type cmd and press Enter .
4. Go to the folder where the files are located. To do this, use the command cd pathfolder .
5. Use the copy command to merge files: copy /b img.jpg + files.zip output.jpg . Here img.jpg is your image, files.zip is the file archive you want to hide, and output.jpg is the name of the output image in which the archive will be hidden. Now the files.zip archive is hidden inside output.jpg .

For Linux:

1. Prepare an image (eg img.jpg ) and archive (eg files.zip ).
2. Make sure both files are in the same folder.
3. Open a terminal.
4. Navigate to the folder where the files are located using the command cd /path/to/folder .
5. Use the cat command to merge files: cat img.jpg files.zip > output.jpg . Here img.jpg is your image, files.zip is the file archive you want to hide, and output.jpg is the name of the output image in which the archive will be hidden. Now the files.zip archive is hidden inside output.jpg .

Extracting a hidden archive

For Windows:

1. Open a command prompt and navigate to the image folder using the cd pathtofolder command .
2. Rename the file output.jpg to output.zip .
3. Open the archive using any archiver.

For Linux:

1. Open a terminal and navigate to the image folder using the command cd /path/to/folder .
2. Use the tail command to extract a hidden archive: tail -c +$(( $(stat -c %s img.jpg) + 1 )) output.jpg > extracted_files.zip .
3. Open the extracted_files.zip file using any archiver (for example, unzip ).

Now you know how to hide an archive with files in an image without using third-party utilities. This method is simple and does not require additional software, but keep in mind that advanced steganography may require specialized tools.

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👍 If you have any questions or if I would like to discuss the described hacking tools in more detail, then write in the comments. Your opinion is very important to me!