I had no idea the scope of power that Maltego brought to OSINT (open source intelligence), until recently. If you’re unfamiliar with the term OSINT, it is a process of passive data collection and analysis. Without using any active scans, or intrusions, data is collected instead from the public sector.

“Couldn’t I just google it,” I’ve heard some ask. Sometimes, but consider a situation where you wanted to run an investigation on someone. After an hour or so of following different leads from Google, you finally find a page where they have a bitcoin wallet. Then you grab the wallet ID, look for a place to look at the transactions, and then somehow have to incorporate any data discovered into some reporting system.

What if instead it was all happening in the same utility? Not only that, what if that utility had a hundred or more connections (many free) to data repositories that you could easily query?

In the video below, a free version of Maltego is used to showcase what it can find in a very rapid amount of time. This video wasn’t done to convey any real results, but more to showcase the depth of the tool. In this demo, only one data feed was used (LittleSis.org). Also, keep in mind that this video is only focusing on a public persona lookup. Maltego can be used for a variety of purposes, including data lookups on Domains, Websites, IP addresses, crypto wallets, etc.