The accused Russian Cheap Fut Coins spy network

The accused Russian Cheap Fut Coins spy network started using steganography as early as 2005, according to the Justice Department criminal complaint against the conspirators, unsealed yesterday in Manhattan. In 2005, law enforcement agents raided the home of one of the alleged spies. There, they found a set of password-protected disks and a piece of paper, marked with alt, control, e, and a string of 27 characters. When they used that as a password, the G-Men found a program that allowed the spies to encrypt data, and then clandestinely to embed the data in images on publicly available websites.

The G-Men also found a hard drive. On it was an address book with website URLs, as well as the user web traffic history. These addresses, in turn, had links to other websites, the complaint notes. Law-enforcement agents visited some of the referenced websites, and many others as well, and have downloaded images from them. These images appear wholly unremarkable to the naked eye. But these images and others have been analysed using the Steganography Program. As a result of this analysis, some of the images have been revealed as containing readable text files.