Today we officially announce a set of Maltego transforms for interacting with the OpenDNS Investigate API.
Wait. You guys have an API?
If you haven’t heard, OpenDNS has an API for our Investigate product. Investigate automates protection against both known and emergent threats and exposes the intelligence we derive from our global DNS visibility. This global visibility can be used for a bunch of different things. The research team here at OpenDNS uses it internally to further explore and categorize online threats. Other internal security teams could use it to do the same or they could use this information for monitoring and mapping external corporate network assets.
What is Maltego?
Maltego is a cross platform interactive application, by Paterva, for exploring relationships and conducting link analysis. Relationship and entity graphs are generated in Maltego through transforms, which automatically extend the graph a user is working on. Relationship graphs are a flexible means of expressing interactions and producing intelligence. Maltego is used extensively for reconnaissance in penetration testing engagements. It can graphically express links between infrastructure, systems, services, accounts, and people, and ultimately assist in attack targeting.
What can people do with this new awesomeness?
Exploring how domain names map to IP addresses, which IP addresses are authoritative for a domain, and which domains reverse map to those IP addresses is a great way to gain insight into malicious actor’s infrastructure. Couple these relationships with domain registration information and sample analysis and you’re on your way to tracking Internet threats. Available transforms provide the ability to locate:
- IP addresses a domain previously resolved to
- Domain names an IP address previous mapped to
- Domain names that cooccur with a domain name
- Domain names that are related to a domain name
- The authoritative name servers for a domain
- IP addresses of a domain’s name servers
Each domain entity returned by these transforms includes the content and security labels OpenDNS has categorized the domain name as.
I’m sold. How can I get it?
The Maltego local transforms that takes advantage of the OpenDNS Investigate API can be found here.
Doesn’t OpenDNS have its own visualization engine?
We do. It’s called OpenGraphiti and it also takes advantage of our Investigate API and has the ability to visualize over 10,000 nodes.