Kaspersky Lab researchers identified a new trend: malicious hackers increasingly using steganography, a digital version of an ancient technique of hiding messages inside images, to conceal the tracks of their activity.

In recent months, Kaspersky Lab researchers witnessed at least three cyberespionage operations utilizing this technique. More troublingly, the IT security company firms said, the active adoption of the technique by other cybercriminals.

Kaspersky Lab researchers discovered steganography used in updated version of Trojans including, Zerp, ZeusVM, KINS, Triton and others. Most of these malware families generally target financial organizations and financial services users. The latter could signal upcoming mass adoption by malware authors and, as an outcome, generally increased complexity of malware detection.