By Chris Gates, CISSP, GCIH, C|EH, CPTS

According to their web site, "Paterva invents and sells unique data manipulation software. Paterva is headed by Roelof Temmingh who is leading a light and lethal team of talented software developers." On May 6 2008, they released a new version of a very kewl tool named Maltego.

"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. Coupled with its graphing libraries, Maltego, allows you to identify key relationships between information and identify previously unknown relationships between them. It is a must-have tool in the forensics.security and intelligence fields!"

Chris Gates' talk at ChicagoCon 2008s entitled "New School Information Gathering" touched on many tools and techniques. One of the tools he introduced to the audience is Maltego v2. This first in a two part series expands on this new tool with a basic introduction to Maltego followed by step-by-step personal recon tutorials. Part II will focus on infrastructure enumeration with Maltego.