Do you know how much information about you and your organisation floats around on the Internet? Do you know that this information can be pieced together to create a comprehensive profile of a person or company?
Maltego is a tool that does just this. It draws from numerous data sources and presents data interdependencies in a way that can be easily understood. It presents the user with ways of visualising complex data sources and their relationships.
Maltego (www.paterva.com) is the brain-child of Roelof Temmingh, and was co-developed by Paterva and Pinkmatter Solutions.
"There is an abundance of information on the Internet that can be used to create a comprehensive profile of a person or organisation," says Roelof Temmingh, founder of Paterva. "Maltego finds real-world links between entities such as e-mail addresses, domains and individuals. The software provides the user with a graphical interface that makes visualising these relationships instant and accurate - even if they are three or four degrees of separation away."
The tool is aimed mainly at organisations dealing with law enforcement, intelligence and information security. The software was first released in July 2007 and is now used by more than 5 000 security auditors, penetration testers and forensic investigators worldwide.
The design allows for the addition of custom transforms and entity types that make it possible to search for virtually any type of information. The software can thus be adapted to enable corporations to search their own distributed internal data sources.
"Version 2 which will be publicly released near the end of May and provides many exciting features for data visualisation. Maltego is easy and quick to install - it uses Java, so it runs on Windows, Mac and Linux. We are currently conducting beta testing to make it faster, smarter and better," says Temmingh.
Maltego version 2.0 is set to be released in May 2008.
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