There have been many robust image steganography methods that are invented in recent decades. However, this technique also may be used by malicious users to transmit dangerous information through the Internet beyond the control of the security agencies. How to detect and/or block potentially dangerous information transmission on the Internet through billions of images while not affecting the normal digital images becomes a challenging problem. Existing steganalysis methods or steganography attacking methods cannot be used for analyzing a large volume of digital images in a short time. In this paper, we propose an effective steganography attacking method that is not limited by the types of the steganography method. The proposed method can process the digital images to remove the potentially dangerous hidden information while keeping the digital image in a high visual quality. Inspired by the way in which printers and scanners work, our method decouples the human visual perception and the digital image's numerical values. It causes the numerical values of the image to change dramatically, and then the hidden information are largely damaged, while at the same time, the visual image quality can be maintained. Our experimental results have demonstrated that the peak signal-to-noise ratio of images can be above 32 dB while the stego data are destroyed. Copyright (C) 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.