AntiSteg

The name AntiSteg stands for Anti-Steganography. AntiSteg was designed to be a command line tool for cleaning images and widely used Windows AVI files of potentially harmful steganographical content.

Many popular image formats (especially those spread via the Web), as well as AVI movie formats are handled by the tool.

Steganography is a means by which information is hidden inside of images / movies (often via high-encryption algorithms), making them completely invisible to all standard image viewers / movie players. Stegged images/movies can carry extremely harmful payloads, which include, but are not limited to: - Child pornography/snuff movies - Viruses, Trojans, Spyware, Spamware, and other Malware - Sensitive personal/corporate Data

AntiSteg does not attempt to extract the actual hidden data, but simply antistegs the content, making it impossible to be retrieved at a later point in time. This approach allows it to quickly clean a computer, even if 100,000s of images or dozens of AVI movies are stored on it. In contrast, trying to desteg just one image which uses a high encryption encoding (256 bit or higher), and a properly selected password is computationally nearly infeasible. To attempt the same on an AVI movie, is not even worth mentioning!

Since the amount of images / movies stored on the Web approaches staggering numbers (anywhere from 100s of billions to trillions for images alone), the possibility to successfully store and trade / sell child pornography, snuff movies, distribute viruses, or exchange sensitive information is very high.   Even worse, anybody who operates a web site (personal or corporate) that contains images, may unwittingly be helping pedophiles, black-hat hackers, or data spies in their operations. Of course, the same holds true for any e-mail attachment, or MMS being sent!

The next time you view an AVI file download from the Web, or a DVD, which is showing Bambi, or the Little Mermaid consider this: Somebody else on the Globe may be viewing the same movie, but instead of Bambi, or Ariel this person is looking at a privately produced and distributed child porn, or even snuff movie! Hidding short movies within feature length AVIs is trivial, ignoring and/or trivialising the very same, is at best SHAMEFUL!

Currently available antivirus, antispyware, and antimalware tools do NOT address this problem! Firewalls provide no security with respect to asynchronous, bi-directional steganographical communication via 2 web sites (spy site and infected site) and simple web monitoring software augmented with steganographical support for modifying images (hosted on spy site).

Neither heuristic, nor behavior-based antivirus and antispyware applications will detect anything unusal since all software operations are identical to those performed by 1000s of image editing, image viewing, and web site monitoring sofware currently in circulation.

Companies that allow image/movie specific searches - like Google - do NOTHING to prevent stegged images from being spread via their services!

Antisteg supports cleaning images and AVI's stored inside of Windows resource files (i.e., dynamic link libraries, executables, etc.). Resource files are wide spread, often shared among programs, and can carry any type of image and / or AVI files.

Resource files are especially problematic, since programs that utilize them, can either directly or indirectly act as carriers of code which in turn activate triggers for invoking hidden code functions. All of course neatly hidden inside of steganographically infected image / AVI files and out of sight of every antivirus, antimalware, antispyware, etc. computer sentinels.