- Chapter 7. Industrial Espionage in Cyberspace
- What Is Industrial Espionage?
- Information as an Asset
- Real-World Examples of Industrial Espionage
- How Does Espionage Occur?
- Steganography Used in Industrial Espionage
- Phone Taps and Bugs
- Protecting Against Industrial Espionage
- Industrial Espionage Act
- Spear Phishing
- Summary
- Test Your Skills
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Steganography Used in Industrial Espionage
Steganography is a different way of keeping messages secret. Rather than hide them through encryption, it protects communication via obscuring them. Messages are hidden within images. And in some cases other images are hidden within images. The word steganography comes from the Greek steganos, meaning covered or secret, and graphy, meaning writing or drawing. There are several technical means to accomplish this, but the most common is to conceal the data in the least significant bits of an image file. However, data can be concealed in any sort of digital file.
It should also be noted that historically there have been nontechnical means of hiding messages. A few notable examples include the following:
The ancient Chinese wrapped notes in wax and swallowed them for transport.
In ancient Greece a messenger’s head might be shaved, a message written on his head, and then his hair was allowed to grow back.
In 1518, Johannes Trithmeus wrote a book on cryptography and described a technique where a message was hidden by having each letter taken as a word from a specific column.
You might think that steganography requires a great deal of technical knowledge to accomplish; however, there are many software packages available that will perform the steganography for you. Quick Stego and Invisible Secrets are two very easy-to-use software tools that will do steganography for you. MP3Stego is a free tool that hides data inside MP4 files. These are just a few of the tools that one can find on the Internet. The widespread availability of cheap or free tools that are easy to use makes steganography a greater threat to any organization.
