406 Not Acceptable

Yes, that does sound confusing, but you can hide a .rar achive ‘inside’ a jpeg picture file. You can use this to stash away some files you don’t want other users on your computer from seeing. Alternatively you could just use encryption, but this is a quick and easy way to do things, that lets you hide files effectively from normal users. Be warned that it is possible to find the files with tools such as enCase… Thanks to Helpero for this nice tip.

I’d love to toss in some demonstration pictures, but my computer is currently running Ubuntu and I would need to install Windows to do so!

Basically, with this method you can open the file as either a picture or a rar archive. So a normal user will just double click the file and it will open as a picture, whilst you can drag it into Winrar (or any alternative) and it will open as an archive.

Here we go:

1. Find your .rar archive and put it in the same directory as a jpeg picture (I will use C:\ as it is easy to work from there. You can then just copy and paste the file to a better directory.)
2. Open a command prompt by clicking Start, then clicking Run, and typing ‘cmd’  in the Run box and click ok.
3. In the Command window (CMD window) that has appeared, type your directory should already be in the C drive other wise you will need to navigate their. If your CMD window starts in a different directory you can either direct the window their using DOS style commands, or just use that directory for the process (simply move the picture and jpeg to that folder.)
4. Enter ‘copy /b input.jpg + secret.rar ouput.jpg’ without quotes in the CMD window and press Enter.

Remember input.jpg is the picture you are cloning and secret.rar is the file you are hiding. Output.jpg will be the file that has the winrar archive hidden inside.

Open the archive in Winrar to make sure you got everything working correctly.