Unraveling the Vertraxminer Mining Scam – Recover Your Stolen Cryptocurrency In recent years, the world of finance has witnessed a revolutionary surge with the rise of cryptocurrencies. These digital assets have opened up a plethora of investment opportunities, attracting both seasoned investors and newcomers alike. While the vast majority of cryptocurrency ventures are legitimate and…
How to Report and Chargeback Money Lost to Facebook Investment Scams A Facebook investment romance scam is a type of online fraud that involves an online love interest asking you to invest money in order to help them with their business or personal situation. Most often, the “romance” part of this scam will involve the…
If you are just getting started in infosec or cybersecurity, you have probably heard of the term OSINT. OSINT or Open Source Intelligence plays a crucial role in all sorts of investigations. If investigating means to move from a question to an answer, OSINT can often be employed to find the answer. In this article,…
Update on Dec 27 2021, at 12.00pm CET 🔗︎ The vulnerable Docker version of our Comms server (Version 1.0.4) released in July 2021 is now patched. Users running a Docker-deployed Comms server on-premise are advised to update to the newest version 1.0.5. Deployments of the Comms Server via OVA and versions prior to 1.0.4 are…
In this article, we will delve into the world of Maltego and the Maigret Transforms. For the benefit of our readers who have yet to learn about Maltego, it is an OSINT and graphical link analysis tool that is used for collecting and connecting information for the purpose of creating intelligence and automating digital Investigations.…
In June 2021, the United States Government seized several Iranian sites, including presstv[.]com, claiming that the sites were spreading misinformation across their platforms. Below, in the lower right corner, you can see the image that welcomes visitors when they attempt to visit the site. Behind it, the WayBackMachine offers a view of what the site…
Executive Summary 🔗︎ Cryptocurrency has seen enormous growth in the world economy. However, this has paved the way for criminal activity on the blockchain, which is why it is becoming increasingly important to trace and investigate transactions in different cryptocurrencies. The tools to obfuscate criminal cryptocurrency transactions are constantly evolving and luckily, so are the…
Executive Summary 🔗︎ Over the course of the past decade, the internet has dramatically transformed the nature of how information spreads, bringing with it both good and bad consequences. One of the most prominent issues that has multiplied thanks to the internet is disinformation. Disinformation takes place when misleading or biased information is deliberately spread…
Executive Summary 🔗︎ Analysis of social media by Law Enforcement and Government institutions is nothing new. With a great portion of our lives constantly documented online, it’s hard to deny the usefulness of the information they harbor. Recently, TikTok users posted volumes of videos of the advancements of Russian forces across the Ukrainian border, documenting…
Executive Summary 🔗︎ In July of 2020, the “Ghostwriter” disinformation campaign targeting countries like Poland, Latvia and Lithuania came to light. A report from the Cybersecurity firm Mandiant pointed to a hacker group aligned with “Russian security interests” looking to discredit NATO in said countries since at least 2017. According to Mandiant, the hacker group…
Executive Summary 🔗︎ The growing popularity of cryptocurrencies has led to the rise of frauds and scams against those who use them. As with any other type of cyber-enabled fraud, people are often sold on some seemingly unbeatable offer via social media or email. However, this often results in great losses to those hasty enough…
Making investigators’ Lives Easier 🔗︎ More than ever, investigators need data to solve their cases, and they need to connect this data across many sources and silos, both public and proprietary. Not only do they rely on access to this disparate data, but they also need to visualize patterns and find correlations in it to…
In Part 1, we introduced the handy Maltego automation feature known as Machines, and how to use them to further accelerate your investigations. Today, we are happy to announce the release of a new set of Machines designed for cybersecurity and social media investigations. Maltego Machines: A Blog Series 🔗︎ What are Maltego Machines? As…
Executive Summary 🔗︎ Ransomware is a type of software that encrypts users’ data, ensuring that they can no longer recover it without payment. It has been around since about 1989 and has become a very lucrative business with a bleeding impact on organizations: Financial cost of pay-out, loss of reputation, agencies’ fines, permanent data loss,…
With nearly 2.5 billion unique profiles available for searching, People Data Labs allows investigators to advance their person of interest investigations in seconds and with a single click. Founded in 2015, People Data Labs began as recruiting software intended to help companies better understand and source candidates. Today companies around the world and across industries…
With the rise of crypto millionaires flooding social media feeds and the global adoption of cryptocurrencies, a new form of scamming prevails – fake cryptocurrency exchanges – luring new investors looking to be part of the winnings. Below are some examples of the most common ways investors lose their money to scammers. Pig Butchering: Refers…
Social Media Intelligence (SOCMINT) is considered to be a sub-discipline of Open Source Intelligence (OSINT). SOCMINT can be defined as the techniques, technologies, and tools that allow for the collection and analysis of information from social media platforms. SOCMINT can be harnessed by government or non-state actors, such as private intelligence agencies or marketing companies,…
Executive Summary 🔗︎ Maltego is an unparalleled tool when it comes to data mining and visualization, and our biggest sources of data—be it threat intel, social media, company data, or other OSINT data—are the different layers of the internet: the surface web, the deep web, and the dark web. While the deep and the dark…
What a fantastic weekend spent with OSINT, Project Hades, and CipherTrace! We at Maltego are thrilled and honored to sponsor the Darkwebathon 2022 for the second time and see through the challenges over the weekend. Hosted by the Anti-Human Trafficking Intelligence Initiative, the Darkwebathon is a 6-hour sprint with 3 challenges: Hash, Email Address, and…
Since March 2022, Maltego has branched into a whole new content form—podcasts—and we are super excited about it! In this article, we will introduce our podcast, The Pivot, and what you can expect from it. The Pivot: Your New OSINT and Infosec Podcast 🔗︎ Brought to you by Maltego, The Pivot is your new OSINT…
This feature interview is originally published by CIO Review Europe. The role of a digital forensics investigator in today’s cybersecurity landscape is similar to that of a detective going through a trail of evidence to solve a crime. However, to identify and analyse an organization’s fault lines and to prevent cyber threats proactively and efficiently,…
This document provides an overview of how the Echosec integration for Maltego helps investigators monitor global events, gaining insight into trends and making more informed decisions. How Echosec Transforms Benefits Cyber Threat Investigators 🔗︎ The Echosec Transform for Maltego allows users to analyze raw data from a wide range of social networks that are prominent…
At Maltego we strive to make it easier for investigators to access all types of data in a single interface. The Maltego Transform Hub is continuously growing, providing investigators a broad range of relevant data sources at their fingertips. However, navigating all the different Hub items and access options available in the Transform Hub is…
Financial Damage of Fraud and Levers to Combat Fraud 🔗︎ Virtually everyone in the developed world uses the internet, and every four out of five people worldwide admit to shopping online. Even if that only represents slightly over a quarter of the world’s population, it’s still quite impressive. ECommerce and Retail sector is set to…
In an era in which the relevance of information lies not only in its quality and veracity, but also in its immediacy, the need for tools that allow us to access important data in a very narrow margin of time is becoming more crucial than ever. For example, it’s utterly important to track a flight…
About Incident Response 🔗︎ The threats to companies are increasing despite growing expertise and investments in IT security. Companies can no longer protect themselves effectively through prevention alone. It shows that most organizations can’t detect initial intrusions (Attivo Survey, 2020) . Nearly two-thirds (64%) of respondents indicated that 100 days of dwell time . They…
About Cyber Threat Intelligence 🔗︎ Attacks getting more sophisticated, and enterprises may be targeted from adversaries with various domains and motivations. Companies can no longer only work on an incident-by-incident basis, but leverage information on previous incidents to react faster to future incidents identification and mitigation. Incident observations and the intelligence gained from those events…
Maltego Support: Committed To Empowering Meaningful And Excellent Investigations 🔗︎ The Maltego Support team cares and commits to support our Enterprise customers as soon as need(s) arise. Currently, our support team works from 8am to 6pm CET (7am to 5pm GMT) from Monday to Friday. Normally, we maintain operations even on public holidays to support…
We are delighted to announce our latest integration with DeepL, which brings the power of translation into Maltego! Introduction to DeepL Transforms 🔗︎ DeepL’s machine translation technology takes advantage of AI neural networks to produce highly accurate translations. With the new DeepL Transforms from Maltego, you can translate the main value of any Entity in…
Cryptocurrency has forever changed the face of financial transactions, but crypto security is still catching up with other aspects of the industry. Criminals have capitalized on this lag and made big money, and the problem continues to grow. Hackers stole nearly $2 billion worth of cryptocurrency in only the first seven months of 2022. With…
On August the 17th, the Maltego Academic and Non-Profit Research Program had the great pleasure to host a webinar on “How Technology Changed Investigative Journalism”. Our guest speakers Aida and Brian guided us through the thrilling journey of three recently developed journalistic investigations empowered by Maltego. The webinar discusses: A delve into the research of…
In this episode for The Pivot podcast, we welcome our guest, Gisela PĂ©rez de Acha! Gisela is a human rights lawyer, an open source researcher at Berkeley Law’s Investigative Reporting Program and Human Rights Center, and a trainer at Amnesty International’s Digital Verification Corps, which is a global network of volunteers who fact-checks social media…
Since June 2022, Maltego has launched a new social media campaign that provides Maltego users and investigators with cheat sheets showing how to best use our Hub items for certain workflows. Check out the Investigator Toolkit August roundup in this article! Presented to you by Maltego, the Investigator Toolkit series showcases each Maltego Transform Hub…
July 18 by Stephanie Irvine Articles The private investigations industry encompasses a variety of niche investigative work. While images of Sherlock Holmes investigating and solving a murder mystery often pop up in the minds of those outside of the industry, private investigators know that there are a number of things they can investigate outside…
October 21 by PInow Staff Articles Join Inland NorthWest Private Investigators Association Today! Transparency, Truth, and Training Inland NorthWest Private Investigators Association (INWPIA) is a non-profit professional organization founded in August 2021, answering the call for truth, transparency, and training. It’s essential for private investigators to join industry associations in order…
Executive Summary 🔗︎ This blog article examines the psychological rather than the technical aspect of Maltego, in particular – cognitive biases. Understanding and mitigating these phenomena is incredibly important to ensure that the intelligence gathered and the subsequent conclusions derived, are objective and will yield the best possible results. We will look into three examples…
Editor’s Note: This article was republished with additional information written by Brandon LaVan of Southwest Louisiana Process Service. Any opinions of guest contributors belong to them. Whether or not you realized it at the time, you have probably collected Open Source Intelligence, (OSINT) at some point in your investigative career. True to its name,…
Terrorism is a significant global concern that afflicts many nations, particularly those under the superpower banner. Terrorism manifests at two significant levels, international and domestic. Domestic terrorism is the illicit or threatened application of violence or force by an individual or group operating and based solely within a country’s territory without foreign influence committed against…
Since June 2022, Maltego has launched a new social media campaign that provides Maltego users and investigators with cheat sheets showing how to best use our Hub items for certain workflows. Check out the Investigator Toolkit September roundup in this article! Presented to you by Maltego, the Investigator Toolkit series showcases each Maltego Transform Hub…
The term Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT) has become so popular and marketable these days, chances are you have most definitely seen mentions of it somewhere. One might encounter it when comparing different data sources, when learning about investigative techniques, or as a category of data collection and analysis tools. While all of its different connotations may…
In this episode of The Pivot podcast, we welcome Vicente Diaz! Vicente Diaz is the Threat Intelligence Strategist in the VirusTotal team at Google. With years of valuable experience in the field, Vicente shared his experiences about his threat hunting journey and what threat intelligence means to him. This episode also answers questions for all…
Since June 2022, Maltego has launched a new social media campaign that provides Maltego users and investigators with cheat sheets showing how to best use our Hub items for certain workflows. Check out the Investigator Toolkit October roundup in this article! Presented to you by Maltego, the Investigator Toolkit series showcases each Maltego Transform Hub…
Maltego’s master list of important OSINT resources is updated for 2022! Learning how to use open source intelligence for investigations is a never ending road. Luckily, there are many who have traveled the same way and shared their footsteps. Celebrating Cybersecurity Awareness Month in 2021, we started OSINT October as a campaign to help both…
In this episode for The Pivot podcast, we welcome our guest LĂ©a Ronzaud from Graphika! LĂ©a plays a central role at Graphika as an investigator specializing in online investigations, state influence operations, and European extremist groups. She is part of the team that exposed Secondary Infektion is a series of operations run by a large-scale,…
Since June 2022, Maltego has launched a new social media campaign that provides Maltego users and investigators with cheat sheets showing how to best use our Hub items for certain workflows. Check out the Investigator Toolkit November roundup in this article! Presented to you by Maltego, the Investigator Toolkit series showcases each Maltego Transform Hub…
Lighthouse Reports’ Investigation into Europe’s Shadow Border Army 🔗︎ In September 2022, Maltego had the pleasure to host the webinar, “Exploitation of refugees in the European Union,” with Bashar Deeb and Klaas van Dijken from Lighthouse Reports. Bashar shared with us the difficult and dangerous path they followed to complete an OSINT and Maltego-based investigation:…
This document provides an overview of how the OpenSanctions integration for Maltego enables investigators to find person of interest, investigate them, and their associations thoroughly. How OpenSanctions Transforms Enhances Due Diligence Investigations 🔗︎ OpenSanctions is an open source intelligence effort to build the world’s most transparent database of persons of interest. We combine 50+ official…
The “Mindset” Challenge 🔗︎ The first hurdle for analysts is identifying the relevant and diagnostic information from the increasing volume of ambiguous and contradictory data that is acquired through open source and clandestine means… all individuals assimilate and evaluate information through the medium of “mental models” (sometimes also called “frames” or “mind-sets”). United States Government.…
Toronto – The Canadian Securities Administrators (CSA) announced today that it is seeking input on improving access to real-time market data for equity securities, including several proposed regulatory options to improve its availability. Access to real-time market data, which contains critical information about orders sent to and trades executed on all Canadian equity marketplaces, is…
Toronto – The Canadian Securities Administrators (CSA) today published CSA Staff Notice 96-303 Derivatives Data Reporting Transition Guidance. In light of upcoming changes to derivatives data reporting in the United States, the CSA is providing guidance to market participants that report over-the-counter derivatives data in Canada as required by CSA derivatives data reporting rules. We…
