As mentioned earlier, Maltego Tungsten enables a variety of functions.  These functionalities may be applied to penetration testing; these may be applied to general Web and Internet-based research.  In a sense, Maltego Tungsten enables the creating of some coherence of connections on the indexable Web.  To review, Maltego enables… 

• the mapping of the underlying technologies used for the hosting of a site;

• the linking of a disambiguated person to related email addresses; 

• the geolocating of a Twitter account; 

• the geolocating of various types of online information to physical spaces; 

• the mapping of a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) to its related network and domain information; 

• the identification of devices used on a particular Web network; 

• the identification of a Net infrastructure for a website;

• the mapping of the cyber entities based on a certain physical location; 

• the linking of a semi-disambiguated alias with personally identifiable information (PII); 

• the link between an email address and a disambiguated individual; 

• the link between a phone number to a disambiguated individual or other online information;  

• the link between a disambiguated phrase with other online information;

• the mapping of social networks based on a Facebook account; and 

• the mapping of social networks based on a Twitter account.  

To provide a sense of how to extract information from the Web and the Internet using Maltego Carbon, for academic research purposes, it helps to begin with some basic research objectives.  Then, a research strategy should be defined.  Seeding information should be identified from which to begin the data extraction.  

The parameters of the data extraction need to be defined. One important one involves the desired number of results, whether 12, 50, 255 or 10k (on the slider in the ribbon under the Investigate tab).  

The extractions should be run, with adjustments on further related extractions based on the initial extracted data.  Then, the necessary datasets should be extracted for potential further analyses as needed in other tools.