Thursday, December 03, 2009

Maltego is the 2009 Toolsmith Tool of the Year

Maltego: transform and correlate

December 2009's edition of the ISSA Journal's toolsmith discusses Maltego at length with specific attention to transforming RFI and scareware attributes.
Maltego is an open source intelligence and forensics application.
While researching and writing for December's article I fell completely for this tool.
It was a difficult decision having covered some brilliant and remarkable tools in 2009, but only one can come out on top.

The 2009 Toolsmith Tool of the Year is Maltego.
Congratulations to Andrew MacPherson and his team.

As an example, I used Maltego to analyze remote file include (RFI) attacks against my website and found it to be an extraordinary addition to my toolkit.
RFI attack URL strings often end with a common script name with a .txt or .gif extension.
I grabbed five such file names as most often seen in my logs from October:
zfxid1.txt
id1.txt
fx29id1.txt
idxx.txt
crespon1.txt
fxid1.txt

I fed these to Maltego and one of the URLS revealed showed results for a U.S. IP address, further showing that it had been flagged seven times for RFI attacks. This IP address has been identified as hijacked host/automated scanning drone due to the fact, that the host at this IP address has tried to injected a malicious script (RFI attack): http://www.ciasoftwares.com/fxid1.txt [show script].
Clicking the show script link then revealed that the script has a hash of a05dfd7cca7771a7565a154d65f05ea2 with all the attack details including script locations (RFI URLs), related IPs, and RFI script details. The figure below just begins to highlight how powerful Maltego really is.



The ISSA Journal December 2009 toolsmith article is here.
Again, congratulations to Maltego and Andrew MacPherson.

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