Analysis of Facebook steganographic capabilities

The massive information-sharing capabilities and global reach of Facebook are of great interest to organizations of all types, including those with malicious and/or illegal intents. Our main findings in this research include the following. Steganography can be employed to send covert information via Facebook photos and potentially videos as well. Facebook Cover Photos can effectively utilize steganography, of at least 15.75% capacity using DCT coefficient embedding algorithms. Network traffic analysis determined no distinguishable differences between network traffic patterns of normal images and cover photos as they were uploaded to the Facebook servers. Firewall rules can be written to block all image uploads to Facebook.