14 DAY TRIAL // Want an alternative solution to traditional storage solutions? Do hard drives, physical storage devices and online storage services simply not have enough kick four your taste? Then Juggling is the answer for you. Essentially, Juggling is a parasitic storage technique designed to take advantage of the spare bytes on the hard drives and RAM of the machines connected to the Internet, and the best solution to hide your porn.
Joking aside, theoretically, at any given time, a potential free online storage space measured in excess of terabytes is available for Juggling. Ron Bowes, Symantec Security Response Researcher, revealed that online parasitic storage techniques are associated with safeguarding sensitive or illegal information. "The goal for the attacker is to ensure that the complete body of information is never on their computer all at once, but that part of it is always traversing the Internet. This can be accomplished in several ways, but one common way is to use the ping functionality. The attacker finds a large number of slow and stable servers, and sends an encrypted piece of the information to each of them. When the information comes back, it's immediately re-transmitted to another random server in the group," Bowes commented.
Abusing SMTP (email) servers is another method related to parasitic storage. Bowes revealed that the first command sent to an SMTP server, namely "HELO", comes with a volume of bytes and a newline. An attacker could - with this method - echo a message back and forth, and store the data on the SMTP server's buffer.
"What is the point of juggling? Because the information is encrypted and the complete body of information doesn't exist in any one place, it's nearly impossible for an attacker to retrieve the data, unless someone manages to take control of the juggling program. If the computer is powered off or unplugged, the data is lost forever. Although losing data this easily may be seen as a drawback to some, it's an advantage when the attacker wants plausible deniability. As far as anyone such as parents or law enforcement can tell, the data never even existed," Bowes explained.
But perhaps the easiest way to perform parasitic storage is to abuse free online image histing websites and stenography, a process that enables the encoding of text within images. Parasitic storage is the next best thing to encryption and to online storage. The data is not only encrypted, but also spread around the Internet. And it is as if it never existed...