Security News > 2021 > May > A picture is worth a thousand words, but to hackers, it’s worth much more

Why? Hackers are able to use image steganography techniques to conduct malicious activity and ultimately compromise enterprise networks.

What is image steganography? Image steganography is the practice of using hidden writing techniques to secretly pass information embedded within images.

Today, hackers use steganography to obfuscate payloads embedded inside of the image that can be undetectable by traditional security solutions and successfully spread malware.

The malicious image can be delivered as an attachment, or the hacker can post the image on a public website with a link to provide the payload. The image can be slightly altered on the bits and bytes when leveraging the steghide method, but when the hacker embeds the payload in the metadata, the image is not altered at all.

Hackers use image steganography as an evasion technique and delivery mechanism because, once the hacker has access to a computer on a corporate network, it's game over for the company.

The hackers then commonly deploy ransomware or another payload that puts the hacker in control.

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