Enabling command and control using steganography

This recipe will show how steganography can be used to control another machine. This can be handy if you are trying to evade Intrusion Detection System (IDS)/firewalls. The only traffic that would be seen in this scenario is HTTPS traffic to and from the client machine. This recipe will show a basic server and client setup.

Getting ready

In this recipe, we will use the image sharing website Imgur to host our images. The reason for this is simply that the Python API for Imgur is easy to install and simple to use. You could choose to work with another, though. However, you will need to create an account with Imgur if you wish to use this script and also register an application to get the API Key and Secret. Once this is done, you can install the imgur Python libraries by using pip:

$ pip install imgurpython

You can register for an account at http://www.imgur.com.

Once signed up for an account, you can register an app to obtain an API Key and...