In recent years, the criminal use of information hiding techniques (i.e., steganography) in digital media such as images, video, audio and text files has been increasing rapidly. An important reason for this is that many steganographic tools have been made available as program source code packages. Consequently, perpetrators can easily selectively pick, adapt and combine information hiding tools for their criminal activities.

Due to the availabbility of tools, we are observing a significant increase in the use of steganographic methods in typical areas such as cybercrime and malware attacks and campaigns as well as beyond. In preparation of UNCOVER, an initial survey of the Criminal Use of Information Hiding (CUIng) initiative on the Europol Platform for Experts (EPE) reveals that evidence of steganography and related principles has been found in a wide variety of types of crime including child pornography, industrial espionage, criminal attacks on enterprises, credit card fraud and skimming, system intrusion, and backdoor injection and delivery methods.

However, steganographic methods and technologies are a major challenge for Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs) due to a lack of resources and procedures for investigations or structured operations. These problems are amplified by the increasing amount of digital evidence that LEAs and judicial partners have to handle. UNCOVER therefore aims to address these issues and to further develop steganographic tools in order to establish a tailored toolkit for LEAs.