Hide Secret Data Inside Any File

Hide Secret Data Inside Any File

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There's any number of great ways to hide data from prying eyes—TrueCrypt, anyone? But if you want to simply hide some text data inside a secret "compartment", you can abuse the Alternate Data Streams feature in the underlying NTFS file system. All you have to do is open up a command prompt, and then use a command similar to this:

notepad SomeFile.txt:SecretWordHere.txt

The special filename with the colon and second filename tells NTFS to actually store the data in an alternate stream, instead of the regular file. You can put whatever you want into the file, and nobody will be able to access it unless they know the command to retrieve it.