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You can use Maltego to gather, analyze, and visualize publicly available information, uncovering relationships and patterns between entities like domains, IP addresses, social media profiles, and more.
In this article, we’ll show you how to use Maltego, a vital tool for cyber security professionals, particularly penetration testers. We’ll begin by explaining what Maltego is and guiding you through the process of starting it up. Next, we’ll explore the main interface, breaking down key sections to make them easy to understand.
After that, we’ll provide an overview of utilizing Maltego’s Transforms, a central feature that enables you to uncover hidden relationships within data sets. Finally, we’ll discuss the best practices when using Maltego, ensuring you can utilize this powerful tool effectively and responsibly.
If you’re ready to dive into the world of Maltego, let’s begin.
What Is Maltego?
Maltego is a tool that leverages open-source intelligence (OSINT) developed by Paterva. Maltego comes in different versions, including a community edition that can be used for free with some limitations, as well as commercial versions that offer more features and capabilities.
Maltego is a vital tool in the arsenal of a penetration tester. As a graphical link analysis tool, it lets you visualize connections within complex data sets, displaying interconnected links. By analyzing information from various sources such as public websites, email addresses, social media, and cryptocurrency transactions, Maltego aids in uncovering hidden relationships and patterns.
This is particularly useful in penetration testing, where understanding the target’s digital footprint and connections can be crucial. Working up to 80% faster with Maltego than traditional methods allows for efficient reconnaissance.
Starting Up
We will now show you how to get Maltego up and running. For our demo moving forward, we will be using Kali. Maltego can also be installed on Windows, macOS, and other Linux distributions.
Maltego is an extremely powerful tool and can do so much more than what we’ve shown you here. Using Maltego, you could map out the digital footprint of a target organization, including identifying key employees, emails, social media profiles, or devices.
This information can be used with tools like the Social Engineer Toolkit for information gathering. It can be used to create:
Phishing Campaigns: Information gathered about email addresses and social connections could aid in crafting targeted phishing emails.
Spear Phishing and Social Engineering Attacks: Insights into the relationships between entities might inform more advanced spear-phishing or social engineering attacks.
Best Practices
Let’s talk about some Maltego usage best practices. Maltego is a very versatile tool that can do many things, and there are some things you can do to work more effectively and intelligently before and while using it. Our list of recommendations for working with Maltego is provided below.
- Create a Strong Workflow: Understand your goal before you start. Map out what you want to uncover and tailor your search accordingly.
- Use Transforms Wisely: Transforms are queries that fetch you different data types. Learn them well, and use only what’s necessary. Too many unnecessary Transforms may clutter your results.
- Secure Your Data: Maltego can pull sensitive information. Make sure you handle it with care.
- Stay Up to Date: The digital world and tools like Maltego change rapidly. Regularly update to the latest version to keep up with new features and security enhancements.
- Use Entities Properly: Entities are the building blocks in Maltego. Use them correctly to represent the data you’re working with.
- Use Notes and Bookmarks: You can attach notes to entities, connections and bookmark essential elements. This helps track why something is important or how you discovered it.
- Export and Share with Care: You can export your findings to share with others. But remember, this might include sensitive data, so only share it with those who need it.
Conclusion
As you can see, Maltego is a powerful tool used in penetration testing and other investigations. It provides a graphical representation of your data and enables clear visualization of complex relationships and connections, and aids in the thinking process.
In this article, we began by explaining Maltego and guiding you through its installation process. Next, we demonstrated how to get Maltego up and running, and we introduced you to the main interface. Following that, we dove into initiating an investigation and working with Transforms. Finally, we outlined some best practices to follow when using Maltego.