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Bit Maps & bitcoins puzzle

e
enricomaria.follega (1460 points)
8 18 29
in Programming in Python by (1.5k points)
Couple of times i heard of people publishing images on the net, claiming that inside the picture there was the address to a bitcoin account.

During the lecture we talked about bitmaps that, if i didn’t get wrong, can generate also an image.

What is the technic used to find hided information inside an image?

Is it useful to look at the bitmap of the image?

Colours are hexa coded right?

So the account could be any pixel.
499 views

2 Answers

gianluca5539 (9820 points)
4 6 44
by (9.8k points)
Information is hidden in images by editing their Hex. You can use an Hex editor to find Zero Bytes sectors that can be used to store any text you want.

If you want further information on this topic, have a look here:

https://www.google.it/amp/s/www.editprivacy.com/hide-text-inside-any-file-using-hex-editor/amp/?espv=1

Have a nice day!
Ganni02 (4920 points)
1 2 15
by (4.9k points)
Something which you might find interesting to read about is Steganography - the practice of hiding a secret message inside of (or on top of) something. There are multiple tools that can be used to do this and it is something also used in CTFs (Capture the Flags).

This is the CompTIA link for further information about Steganography, how it can be used and detected in special relation to cybersecurity (might be slightly different from your question but is also quite an interesting read): :))

https://www.comptia.org/blog/what-is-steganography#:~:text=Steganography%20is%20the%20practice%20of,do%20more%20than%20share%20messages.&text=This%20revealed%20the%20secret%20message%20I%20wanted%20to%20share.
Lorenzo_Pellegrino (820 points)
2 6 10
by (820 points)
The fact that attackers can embed entire scripts in normal files such as excel or word is terrifying, I wonder if there's any method to prevent it.
d
daniel4x0 (4590 points)
0 0 2
by (4.6k points)
You can use softwares like deep instinct's threat prevention.
Ganni02 (4920 points)
1 2 15
by (4.9k points)
The other more obvious way can br checking the size of the file as this is usually inflated if there is something hidden in it