Last updated: September 2, 2024
Le Footprint is a security audit technique that consists of find information about a person or on computer systems and all the entities to which they are attached.
This technique makes it possible to obtain information about the infrastructure of a target network, only from information to which access is free and authorized.
- Network enumeration;
- Identification of the operating system;
- Organization queries;
- Ping scan;
- Queries on contact points;
- WHOIS queries;
- SNMP requests;
There is an open source graphical application that allows you to perform all these methods in a simple and fast way, it is called Maltego.
Maltego allows you to easily and visually find information such as the various potential e-mail addresses of a person, telephone numbers that could be associated with him, IP addresses, DNS, mail server, host, company employees and much more.
This relatively comprehensive tool saves time in the long and tedious task of collecting information and will allow you to work more accurately and smarter.
Main features of Maltego
Maltego allows you to list important information such as:
- Domain names.
- Whois information.
- The architecture of the entire network.
- Person's IP address.
- Email addresses associated with a person's name.
- Account Facebook of somebody.
- Websites associated with a person's name.
- Phone number associated with a person's name.
- Businesses and organizations associated with a person's name.
- Blogs for specific tags and phrases.
- File metadata from target domains.
How to use Maltego?
In this part we will see how to use Maltego for find information about a person, we will then use it to get information about the server FunInformatique.
So to get started, go to the official website of the tool and download the Maltego version adapted to your operating system. But be careful, there are two versions of Maltego: community edition (free version) and commercial version (paid version).
Find information about a person
After installation, launch Maltego, and click the Personal / Person icon. Enter the name of the person you want to have information about. In my case, I will list the information about Ahmed. 🙂 Here is the interface you will have on your screens:
To view all the information about a person, just click the right mouse button and select the type of info we want to have. For example his email address, his phone number, or his profile Facebook.
As you can see in the picture, we have found more information about this person, we got email addresses, phone numbers, and social media profiles.
Collect information on a server
To collect information on a server, we must follow the same process as we did for find information about a person, simply :
- Click on "Website" in the palette
- Drag the icon onto the Graph,
- Double click on the icon in the graph
- Enter the domain name of the target server
- Right click the mouse to select the type of info you would like to have.
At the end, you will get all the information about the website in one graph, and this is the strong point of Maltego. As you can see in the picture, I was able to have the IP address of the server, the owner's email address, his name, DNS servers, mail server and many other important information. It's all organized in a hierarchical fashion.
Conclusion
In this post, I explained to you simply a few Maltego software features with two examples. There are other functions that are not discussed in this article. As for example, how to define the entities and the specific transformations? How? 'Or' What use a proxy under Maltego? How to query a clean database to look for information etc. Either way, the goal of this tutorial is to show you the basic functionality of the Maltego tool. 😉