Hide data in files with easy steganography tools

Earlier I wrote about Steganography, also how data/messages can be hidden in image files in these posts :
How to hide files in JPEG’s
Steganography app hides a messages in plain sight
today i find this article on lifehacker, It discusses some windows tools ( Hide in Picture ) that can be used to hide data in images.

Other free Windows tools offer more filetype support. wbStego can encode and decode files in PDF’s, HTML files or bitmaps. mp3stego embeds text inside MP3 files (command line and GUI interface available.) Here are more Windows stego software options [via Webby’s World].

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January 25, 2007 | Filed Under hacks, linux | 3 Comments 

Splash image in GRUB

The splash image is the image shown in the background when GRUB (the GRand Unified Bootloader) is displaying the list of operating systems you can boot.

Creating image

  1. Start the GIMP.
  2. Click on File->New or type Ctrl+N
  3. In the new image dialog, change Width to 640 pixels and Height to 480 pixels. (The image should be of size 640×480 pixels.) Now click OK.
  4. Create the image which you would like to be the splash image. It’s quite fun to experiment with the various tools of the GIMP!
  5. After you have finished creating the image, hit Alt+i or right click on the image and click on Image->Mode->Indexed…
  6. In the Indexed Color Conversion dialog that appears, click on the radio button “Generate optimal Palette” and in “# of colors” enter 14. Click OK.(The image should be of only 14 colors)
  7. Now right-click on the image and click on File->Save As…Save the file as ImageName.xpm in a directory of your choice.

You can also pickup an image and convert to required format by ImageMagik: 

convert -resize 640x480 -colors 14 picture.jpg ImageName.xpm

Installing the Image

In the /boot/grub/grub.conf you have to point splashimage to newly created image i.e

# Splash Image
splashimage=(hd0,0)/grub/ImageName.xpm.gz

Now you just need to reboot !!

Here is my boot splash screen: I just added my name and Gentoo logo :

This is converted to jpeg. As blogger doesn’t support xpm images.

And some others :Some splash images

UPdated
For LILO you can refer to Lilo Boot splash

March 20, 2006 | Filed Under linux, tutorial | Leave a Comment