

There are various footprints built inside Maltego which can be run against the target. After configuring that, the configured machines need to be started. To use Maltego first, the user should be registered on the Paterva site.Īfter registering, the user can create a new machine or run machines to run transforms on the target. Maltego helps to perform a significant reconnaissance against targets with the help of several built-in transforms (as well as providing the capability to write custom ones).


Maltego is developed by Paterva and is an inbuilt tool in Kali Linux (ships with community edition).

Note: We will only see one or two features for each OSINT tool mentioned below to see how much value they can bring in during the reconnaissance phase. Below are some of the common Open Source Intelligence tools used by malware actors and penetration testers. The challenge for penetration testers and malware actors is to make sense of these humongous chunks of data in order to know all the possible traits of intended targets. The data that we get from the information-gathering phase reveals a lot about the target, and in the digital world, there are huge footprints of assets exposed to the outside world. Information gathering plays an essential part in any penetration activity. As per the US Department of Defense, OSINT is “produced from publicly available information that is collected, exploited, and disseminated in a timely manner to an appropriate audience for addressing a specific intelligence requirement.” Top 5 OSINT toolsīelow are the Open Source Intelligence Tools most often used by penetration testers and even malware actors to gather information about the specified target. OSINT refers to a collection of data from public sources to be used in an intelligence context, and this type of open source information is often missed by link-crawling search engines such as Google.
