How "noisy" is Maltego?

edited March 2012 in Tech & Games
I've been playing around with a tool on Backtrack Linux called Maltego, just lately. As written on their website;
Maltego is an open source intelligence and forensics application. It will offer you timous mining and gathering of information as well as the representation of this information in a easy to understand format.

Essentially, it's an information gathering tool which displays your results on screen in a graphical format, so you don't have to have your information stored in a massive text file. It's visually pleasing and fairly easy to use, being a point and click piece of software. However, I was wondering;

How noisy is Maltego, when compared to gathering information manually?

What techniques does it actually use to gather information, and are they particularly intrusive?


I'm always a little paranoid of using graphical-based tools when poking around because they tend to hide things from you - stuff which is actually going on in the background. I've been a manual information-gatherer up until now, so I don't really know a lot about Maltego. However, I've found that it does a good job and I'll continue using it if it turns out to be a very passive scanner.

Comments

  • MarineBoatMarineBoat Regular
    edited March 2012
    trx100 wrote: »
    How noisy is Maltego, when compared to gathering information manually?

    What techniques does it actually use to gather information, and are they particularly intrusive?

    You're at the mercy of the developers on this one. What I recommend doing is picking up an old computer for a few bucks at a yard sale or thrift store and testing any tools you plan on using against that. That way, you can look at the logs and see what the sysadmin would see should you use it in a more "real-life" environment. As a bonus you might be able to pick some poop on the harddrive -- never know what strangers keep on their computers!
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