Maltego

Maltego specializes in uncovering relationships among people, companies, domains and publicly accessible information on the internet. It’s also known for taking the sometimes enormous amount of discovered information and plotting it all out in easy-to-read charts and graphs. The graphs do a good job of taking raw intelligence and making it actionable, and each graph can have up to 10,000 data points.

The Maltego program works by automating the searching of different public data sources, so users can click on one button and execute multiple queries. A search plan is called a “transform action” by the program, and Maltego comes with quite a few by default that include common sources of public information like DNS records, whois records, search engines and social networks. Because the program is using public interfaces to perform its searching, it’s compatible with almost any source of information that has a public interface, so adding more searches to a transform action or making up a whole new one is easily possible.

Once the information is gathered, Maltego makes connections that can unmask the hidden relationships between names, email addresses, aliases, companies, websites, document owners, affiliations and other information that might prove useful in an investigation, or to look for potential future problems. The program itself runs in Java, so it works with Windows, Mac and Linux platforms.

There is a free version of the program with limited features called Maltego CE. Desktop versions of Maltego XL run $1,999 per instance. Server installations for

large-scale commercial use start at $40,000 and come with a complete training program.