“Exploiting Steganography Image in MS Office Documents”

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Presented at BSidesPerth 2018 by

Dating back as far as ancient Greece, steganography involves concealing a message inside another message or image. Digital steganography uses modern digital technology to conceal a file, message, image, or video within another file, message, image or video. In the last few years, malicious digital steganography has grown increasingly popular as hackers have adopted the technique to trick internet users and evade detection to deliver dangerous payloads.Traditionally, malicious digital steganography has been distributed through a browser in order to load and execute the malicious code, as well as C&C communications channels. However, cybercriminals are constantly adapting their techniques to ensure maximum attack exposure. Because many cybersecurity solutions can now be configured to detect malicious steganography images, it lends to reason that hackers will evolve their attack techniques to hide malicious payloads in other sources, such as MS Office document. To date, no evidence of digital steganography has been found hidden in an MSOffice document, however, the possibility of this type of threat is entirely plausible and realistic, as I will demonstrate in this proof-of-concept paper and presentation.