Agape Blog

You see a nice picture on the internet and say WOW! You now think of downloading the same and forwarding it to your friends. But wait, this can land you in a terror network.

For the terrorists are playing havoc by increasingly adopting a technique called steganography for communicating devastating messages in codes. Steganography involves hiding a message which could contain text, images or maps inside a picture, music file or video on a web page or by e-mail. These messages are harder to find than encrypted ones because they can be hidden amongst any of the billions of web pages. Hidden messages can only be found by someone who knows where to look.

Its not that this technique has been adopted by the terrorists recently. They have used this method in the year 2001 in the Parliament attack (in India) on the 13 December and in the September 11 attack on World Trade Centre (in USA).

Terrorists easily hide vital and sensitive communication by mixing it with large amounts of public data. What might appear to be normal files to an innocent observer can have embedded secret message in it.

So it is advisable not to forward any message sent by unknown sources.