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Comment by htrp | Hacker News Reader

> If you host blobs for free, somebody is going to use you as their host. Even if you just hosted audio, I'm sure somebody will quickly come along with a steganography tool to hide their content on your site (and use your bandwidth).

This feels like something more of a theoretical example cited versus something that has happened. Do you have any examples of steganography being used as bandwidth redirection/hosting?

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Not at all theoretical, this happens all the time. There are tools like StegoShare: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StegoShare

I googled and one of the top articles was this (I didn't read it): https://www.deccanchronicle.com/technology/in-other-news/070...

I couldn't find the article I had read a few years back, but I remember this sort of thing being used to host content on Facebook, Wikipedia, Reddit, etc, before they cracked down on it.

I did this when I was in high school for fun. I used a poorly designed comment system somebody designed and used it to transfer files around hidden in gibberish comments. Maybe not the most common thing, but more common than you would expect.

https://handwiki.org/wiki/GmailFS

https://github.com/maxchehab/redditfs

etc etc.

Many examples (maybe not exactly steganography, but same spirit) in this discussion from three weeks ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28431716

Recently saw a post about using imgur to host websites by the website code embedded in images (steganography?)

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