Computer Based Social Engineering Tools: Maltego Mesh
From Learn to be a true Social Engineer
- NOTE - Since July 2010 Mesh has not worked in Firefox and is no longer supported***
Maltego Mesh is a firefox plugin that helps analysts in quickly find usefull information within a page, essentially it views the page you are looking at and tries to identify text within it that fits preset regular expressions.
Contents |
Entities
By default Maltego Mesh searches for the following 'entities' within a page:
- IP Addresses
- Email Addresses
- Netblocks
- Named entity Extraction (SillyNer)
- Phone Numbers
- Websites
- Dates
Usage
To activate Maltego Mesh, either click View->Sidebar->Maltego Mesh or press Ctrl + Shift + M
Once an entity has been found on a page it will be within the sidebar on the right hand side of the browser as seen below:
The 'entity' types will be within their own tab (for example all Email addresses) will be within the 'Email' tab and the amount of entities found will be within brackets behind the tab label. Maltego Mesh will only show entities found on the current page that you are viewing, however if you find an entity that you regard as interesting you can mark it by selecting the check box to the left of the entity and it will remember the pages that this entity was found and should it come up on another page it will then mark this as well.
For example, if you found the name "Andrew MacPherson" within a page, marked this entity and then right clicked on it and searched for that name on another page if found it would be stored within the main "History" tab. The History Tab can then be used after you have gathered data to view all the pages that you have found your 'marked' entities on.
Why You'd Want To Use It
- Its free (always a plus)
- It helps you find information quickly within a large page (no need to read an entire blog thats metres long to find email addresses)
- Quickly have options like 'search on facebook' with email addresses instead of having to browse to each site.
- The ability to add your own 'entities' (eg, if you are looking for an internal customer id and you know the format, you can add your own regular expression for it)
Why You Don't Want To Use It
Maltego Mesh automatically processes pages looking for things, with this in mind remember its also possible it misses information, such as an email address in the format of (andREMOVErewREPLACE-WITH-ATpatervaDOTCOM). There is nothing that processes information as well as the human brain.
Social-Engineer.org Edition
Paterva has worked together with social-engineer.org[1] to create a special edition of Maltego Mesh that is customized to show social information applicable to a social engineer. You can download this special edition here.[2]
External Links
References
- ↑ http://www.social-engineer.org/
- ↑ http://www.paterva.com/web5/mesh/MaltegoMeshAlpha0988.xpi
- ↑ http://www.paterva.com/web4/index.php/client/mesh
- ↑ http://ctas.paterva.com/Maltego_Videos/Mesh/
