Steganography and Arachniography

Steganography refers to hiding encrypted data or information inside of a common or completely innocent looking file such as an image, audio, or video file.

For all intents and purposes, most people will never be aware that the file is more than it appears to be, thus providing a nice hiding place in plain sight.

If someone does become aware of the ‘extra data’ in a file, it can be identified as encrypted data or information, but will be undecipherable without the decryption key.

An Arachniography is the web-based equivalent of a bibliography. Taking things one step further, an annotated Arachniography is the web-based version of an annotated bibliography.

Andrew J. Butrica of NASA was the person responsible for coining the term during his work on the history of NASA’s X-33 project.

PUP

PUP (short for Potentially Unwanted Program) refers to an unwanted program or piece of software that may be installed along with the program or software that a user actually wants on their system.

A PUP is not classified as malware, but rather as adware, spyware, crapware, etc. What marks the distinction in classification is that users are ‘informed’ about the PUP via the EULA (end user license agreement). But since most people rush past the EULA, it makes it easier for those who push PUPs to have a ‘legal out’; after all, the information was literally spelled out in the EULA.

A rather ‘visible’ form of PUPs are the software installers that come with offers of extra ‘goodies’ such as toolbars, ‘search’ apps, etc., making it a good idea not to rush through any installation process!