Maltego is a data mining and information gathering tool that can provides automatic merging of data to provide visual maps. It is a open source intelligence tool with graphical link analyses tool. Maltego is a great tool to identify relationships and it is extremely useful when you deal with big data. It helps visualize relationships with data and see connections that you would have otherwise missed. You can use maltego for numerous things like seeing if people are spoofing your company’s brand, investigating person of interest for investigation, analyzing domains to see if it’s a scam website, and even analyze documents.
Maltego utilizes entities and transforms. When you type in entities as inputs in maltego, it will use transforms, which is basically a small snippet of codes that fetches information about the entities. The result will return as entities as well. Entities are things like IP, email, or a user. It’s basically pulling relative information that it finds. Transforms are written in python but other languages can be utilized.
From people to groups, from domains to social media accounts, you can pull data from numerous sources like whois records, social medias, various meta data and create a graph that shows connections. The easy to see data representation of the relationships is the selling point of maltego.
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