Maltego and network analysis

Lately I’ve been digging into Maltego and its myriad use cases. It’s almost overwhelming…no, actually it is quite overwhelming. There’s so many features and options and ways of graphing data once you start colleting.

But, once you have a grasp on the tool, it’s mind blowingly amazing.

I used Maltego to help a small business map their domain and network to help them gain insight on their overall infrastructure’s exposure. In years prior when I would try and map a network, it would take me days. With Maltego, less than an hour, and that time was heavily padded because I’m a complete newb who had to dork and YouTube his way through how to use the transforms.

Transforms are the real magic sauce of Maltego. Essentially a transform is an API operation that you trigger on an entity or node. For example, you may want to gather DNS data from a TLD (Top Level Domain), so you would use the DNS from Domain set of transforms; you can run them individually or batch run the entire set. The response is nearly instant. Amazing!

Maltego is also highly regarded for investigating social networks. This can be extremely helpful at a business level to help gain a picture of your current or pontential staff’s online presence and how your entity is represented online. In fact, this is the next aspect I’ll be looking to explore with the team. However, it’s a much larger meal to chew on and may require some additional third-party transforms that aren’t included with Maltego.

Maltego offers a limited (but still powerful) Community Edition of their tool. However, if you want to truly unlock its potential the Professional license is $999 annually. Quite steep for an individual like myself, but perhaps I can turn this into a side gig and offset that cost.

It’s always a good idea to expand your tool kit, skill set, and especially your revenue streams.

Happy hacking!