Analyzing Image Malware with OSINTs after Steganography using Symmetric Key Algorithm

Abstract

Steganography is the practice of hiding a message or information within another file, such as an image (Singh & Singla, 2022). OSINT (Open Source Intelligence) involves using publicly available information for intelligence gathering purposes. In this research, the asymmetric key algorithm will be applied to the steganography method, using 10 images with different sizes and dimensions. Images tested for steganography are in tiff, gif, png, jpg, and bmp format. A combination of steganography and OSINT could involve analyzing and decoding images found on publicly available platforms, such as social media, to uncover hidden messages. On the other hand, steganography within OSINT can also be used to protect sensitive information from prying eyes. Overall, the combination of Symmetric Key Algorithm steganography and OSINT can be a powerful tool for both intelligence gathering and secure communication. Here in this work, malware is developed, and using that malware the victim’s machine is exploited. Later, an analysis is done via freely available OSINTs to find out which is the best OSINT that gives the best results. OSINTs have been very helpful in identifying whether the URLs and files are malicious or not. But how binding an image with the malware makes it difficult for OSINTs to identify they are malicious or not is being analyzed in this work. The analysis shows that the best OSINT is VirusTotal which has a greater number of engines that could detect the malware whereas others don’t have a variety of engines to detect the malware. Also, when it comes to malware afore binding it with an image is easier to detect whereas for an OSINT it was difficult to identify and detect the malware after binding with an image