A security analyst has been notified that trade secrets are being leaked from one of the executives in the
corporation. When reviewing this executive’s laptop they notice several pictures of the employee’s pets
are on the hard drive and on a cloud storage network. When the analyst hashes the images on the hard
drive against the hashes on the cloud network they do not match.
Which of the following describes how the employee is leaking these secrets?

A.
Social engineering

B.
Steganography

C.
Hashing

D.
Digital signatures

Explanation:
Steganography is the process of hiding one message in another. Steganography may also be referred to as
electronic watermarking. It is also the process of hiding a message in a medium such as a digital image,
audio fi le, or other fi le. In theory, doing this prevents analysts from detecting the real message. You
could encode your message in another file or message and use that file to hide your message.
Incorrect Answers:
A: Social engineering is the process by which intruders gain access to your facilities, your network, and
even your employees by exploiting the generally trusting nature of people. A social engineering attack
may come from someone posing as a vendor, or it could take the form of an email from a (supposedly)traveling executive who indicates that they have forgotten how to log on to the network or how to get
into the building over the weekend.
C: Hashing refers to the hash algorithms used in Cryptography.
D: Digital Signatures is used to validate the integrity of the message and the sender.

Dulaney, Emmett and Chuck Eastton, CompTIA Security+ Study Guide, 6th Edition, Sybex, Indianapolis,
2014, pp. 248, 255, 261, 355, 414