Ever since George Orwell's '1984', the world has been wondering whether the government, corporations or other entities are secretly tracking every citizen's move through some information hiding technique. We explain how covert technology is being used to transmit information right in front of our eyes, defeating in some cases network intrusion detectors or similar detection mechanisms. Although cryptography enhances the covert techniques, cryptography in turn cannot protect against them by itself. Hackers have been increasingly taking advantage of covert technologies such as LOKI to penetrate our computer network defenses.