Maltego and computer forensics

While reading an abstract for “Investigating individuals and groups using open source intelligence” presented at hack.lu 2008, I was struck by the potential power of an application called Maltego (screenshots and video tutorials).  From their website:

“Maltego is an open source intelligence and forensics application. It allows for the mining and gathering of information as well as the representation of this information in a meaningful way.”

This is certain an area where computer forensic, e-discovery and other digital investigations can and need to mature.  If an analyst can load significant amounts of data into an application, combine it with online data and then visualize the relationships between deep data sets, a clear picture can emerge in ways previously impossible.

I hope to install the community version soon and see how it works.  I will post a follow up entry sharing my experiences and insights.

To spark your imagination, here’s a list the creators of Maltego put together for potential uses of their application:

• Maltego is a program that can be used to determine the relationships and real world links between:
  • People
  • Groups of people (social networks)
  • Companies
  • Organizations
  • Web sites
  • Internet infrastructure such as:
    • Domains
    • DNS names
    • Netblocks
    • IP addresses
  • Phrases
  • Affiliations
  • Documents and files
• These entities are linked using open source intelligence