How to hide confidential files inside an image using Copy Command (Steganography)

There is always a need to hide your confidential files. It may be your bank statements or research work or a project. In this article, I explain how you can hide confidential files inside an image using the MS-DOS copy command. No extra tools or software needed. For this, you just need Windows OS, your files, and an image. Before we start, this process is called Steganography. Steganography is to apply some logic for hiding secret files or messages within a non-secret file. As a result, the rest of the world only able to see the non-secret file. In this example, we are hiding secret files inside a non-secret image file. Hide files in an image You may have more than one file that you want to hide. To hide your files you need to perform the following steps: Right-click on your Windows Desktop. Create a new folder on your Desktop and name it Test. You can name it something else, in case the Test folder already exists, and replace the word Test in the following steps with your new folder name. Doble-click to open the Test folder. Copy all of your confidential files into the Test folder. Select and compress all of your confidential files in the Test folder. Name the compressed file, Confidential.zip. You can use any compression software, such as WinRAR or simple Windows Zip. Remove all files except the Confidential.zip file. Now, you have only one file in the folder. Copy the image file, which you are ok to be displayed to others when they see your file. For example, smile.png. Open the command prompt, and change directory to Test folder using CD command. For example CD "C:\Users\UserName\Desktop\Test" OR CD "C:\Users\UserName\OneDrive\Desktop\Test" Type the following command when you are in the Test folder. COPY /B smile.png + Confidential.zip BigSmile.png The /B switch of the copy command is used to copy the files as binary. The copy command takes two arguments. The first is the source and the later one is the destination. Here we used the + (plus) symbol to combine two files together, which are smile.png and Confidential.zip. The final output file will be BigSmile.png. This is the file that holds your confidential files but displays as an image, as shown in the following figure. Also please note that the file size difference. This indicates the file contains more information than the original Smile.png file. Unhide files from an image To retrieve the files from an image, you can either open the BigSmile.png file in WinRAR or other compression software or alternatively, change the extension of the file from .png to .zip. This will hide the image and bring the compression software icon in front, such as WinRAR icon. To hide the files again behind the image, you can simply change the extension back to .png from .zip.