{"id":22,"date":"2011-06-10T21:57:00","date_gmt":"2011-06-10T21:57:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/digital-madness.in\/blog\/2011\/%month%\/how-to-hide-files-in-windows\/"},"modified":"2018-02-17T17:56:07","modified_gmt":"2018-02-17T17:56:07","slug":"how-to-hide-files-in-windows","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/digital-madness.in\/blog\/2011\/how-to-hide-files-in-windows\/","title":{"rendered":"How to hide files in windows"},"content":{"rendered":"

i guess this one is fairly important for “guys”…so just go through it…I assure you, you will find this quite important…:D<\/p>

This thing is a basic feature provided by the NTFS<\/a> file system. It also provides the feature of encrypting a file with your own “encryption” method but I’ll come back later to it. Now lets just focus on the “hiding a file”.<\/p>

NTFS supports multiple data streams. <\/b>Actually you must have seen the .mkv<\/b> movie file, its most astonishing feature is that it can contain various types of data in one<\/i> file like the multiple audios, multiple subtitle files, and yes the movie :P. So,basically in NTFS one <\/i>file contain multiple data streams <\/i>independent of each other. In a layman language, NTFS can have a file containing other files<\/b> totally independent of each other. for e.g., a simple .pdf can contain files like .txt, .avi, .zip, etc..<\/p>

This feature can be exploited to hide files on the NTFS partition. For hiding, all we need to do is to create a data stream in the container<\/i> file ( say important.txt) and copy the contents of the same hiding file (say porn.avi ) in that data stream. and one more thing, you can hide as many files as you want in one single file.<\/p>

So here’s the step by step process :
\n1.\u00a0 install some virtual linux environment. That can be anyone of them – cygwin or UnixUtils. This is just to use to use the “cat” command.<\/p>

2. Now open the command prompt and write,<\/p>\n

    cat porn.avi > important.txt:stream_name<\/pre>
this stream_name can be any secret name you prefer. e.g.,<\/p>\n
    cat porn.avi > important.txt:porn.avi<\/pre>
3. the file is now saved in data stream “important.txt:porn.avi<\/b>“. The file porn.avi now can be safely deleted without losing any data.<\/p>
4. Now to extract back the file you just have to write the command,<\/p>\n
    cat important.txt:porn.avi > porn.avi<\/pre>
this will give you the file back you wanted. \ud83d\ude09<\/p>
This method is excellent as the data stream cannot be easily detected as it does not even increases the size of the container<\/i> file. But it has some limitations :<\/p>
1. This works only in NTFS file system.<\/p>
2. If the file is transferred to any other file system (FAT32, EXT2, etc.) all the data streams are lost.<\/p>
3. A data stream cannot be directly accesses through a software. So it has to first extracted to be of use. This feature is not so annoying as this is something we are already been used to by the compressing softwares.<\/p>
4. various meta-data related to a file are deleted in the data stream.<\/p>
5. data stream once created cannot be deleted. One way is to make a copy of the file and delete the previous one. e.g.,
\ncat important.txt > copy_important.txt
\ndel important.txt<\/p>
6. data recovery tools do not handle data streams. so if a file system gets corrupted. there is no way to get back the file.<\/p>
7. you have to remember the exact name of the stream to everytime extract the file.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
i guess this one is fairly important for “guys”…so just go through it…I assure you, you will find this quite important…:DThis thing is a basic feature provided by the NTFS file system. It also provides the feature of encrypting a file with your own “encryption” method but I’ll come back later to it. Now lets…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[20,18,17,19],"class_list":["post-22","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-windows","tag-hide-data","tag-hide-files","tag-hiding","tag-windows"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/digital-madness.in\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/digital-madness.in\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/digital-madness.in\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/digital-madness.in\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/digital-madness.in\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/digital-madness.in\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":192,"href":"http:\/\/digital-madness.in\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22\/revisions\/192"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/digital-madness.in\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/digital-madness.in\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/digital-madness.in\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}