How to Use Maltego for Network Reconnaissance

Before you attempt to exploit any target on a network you've been authorized when pentesting, it is wise to do proper reconnaissance. Without doing reconnaissance, you will likely be wasting your time.

In this tutorial, we will be using an active tool called Maltego, developed by Paterva, that can do many of these tasks with one simple scan. There is a community edition built into our Kali Linux that allows us 12 scans without purchasing Maltego. It is capable of a significant amount of information gathering about a prospective target in a single sweep of the domain.

Using Maltego in Kali to Recon a Target Network

Maltego is capable of gathering information about either a network or an individual; here we will focus on the network and leave individual information gathering for another time. We will be looking at gathering info on all the subdomains, the IP address range, the WHOIS info, all of the email addresses, and the relationship between the target domain and others.

Step 1Open Maltego & Register

Let's start by firing up Kali and then opening Maltego. Maltego can be found in numerous places in Kali, but the easiest way to get to it is to go to Applications -> Information Gathering -> . Then, among the Top listed, you will find Maltego at last but number 5, as shown in the screenshot below.

When you open Maltego, you will need to wait a brief moment for it to startup. After it finishes loading, you will be greeted by a screen asking you to choose how you want to use and register Maltego.

Choose Maltego CE (Community Edition) and click run. 

Go ahead and register and save and remember your password as you will need it again the next time you login into Maltego.

Step 2Choose a Machine & Parameters

After successfully registering and logging into Maltego, we will have to decide what type of "machine" we want to run against our target. In Maltego's parlance, a machine is simply what type of footprinting we want to do against our target. Here, we are focusing on the network footprinting, so our choices are:

• Company Stalker (this gathers email information)
• Footprint L1 (basic information gathering)
• Footprint L2 (moderate amount of information gathering)
• Footprint L3 (intense and the most complete information gathering)

Let's choose an L3 footprint that will gather as much information as we can; this is also the most time-consuming option, so be aware of that.

Step 3Choose a Target

Now, that we have chosen a type of machine for our footprinting, we will need to choose a target. Let's choose our friends at SANS, one of the leading IT security training and consulting firms in the world.

Now, click "Finish" and let Maltego do its work.

Step 4Results

Maltego will now begin to gather info on our target domain, sans.org, and display it on screen. In the screenshot below, we can see that Maltego has already collected the email addresses from the site, while it collects the nameservers and mail servers.

Finally, we can click on "Bubble View" when Maltego is done and see all of the relationships between our target and its subdomains and linked sites.

Maltego is an excellent tool to do network recon on our potential target, enabling us to do numerous types of recon in a single scan with a single tool. Maltego is also capable of doing individual recon, but we will leave that for future next Maltego article.