Just as last week I’ve been discussing stego with colleagues, I missed this Bruce’s post…
Be sure to read the comments, though. A couple on stacking steganography over cryptography, which is what I would presume would work.
And, again the question: what would you know of actual use ‘out there’; is it common, rare, what are the characteristics of its users ..? Is it the next big thing after (?) APTs …?
Oh, here it is; the pic you expected:
[Would ‘Riga’ be a hint that there’s more to the picture …!?]
Bruce’s article mentions stego based changing the LSB (least significant bit) in a picture in such a way that these bits hold the message. The picture tou provided seems to be a JPG-file and JPEG uses lossy compression. In stego you can’t afford that you’re LSB’s are removed or changed by compression. Therefore I doubt if this image contains an LSB kind of stego. And if you post or send a message this size, it’s kind of weird to use lossles compression such as BMP or GIF. That would make them suspicious immediately. There are stego-tools for JPG-files, but these are based on other characteristics (often RNG or PRNG – source Wikipedia)
Thanks! The pic I provided, indeed hasn’t anything hidden — as far as I know ;-] — but the caption was a lure… then again, your analysis is mosr worthwhile!; mission accomplished… 🙂