Importing data into Maltego

@Viss - you make us sad bears with your question on importing. So I decided to make a quick blog post on how to get data into Maltego.

The right way (import)
The commercial version of Maltego has support for visualizing spreadsheets. You can also use this to simple import a single column of data. Let's say you want to import only names. Then it goes a little like so:

Click on the picture above to see what's actually going on. Importing data this way seems like a lot of effort, but it's really useful. Why? Because it allows you to import multiple columns and make a real graph. Imagine you had phone numbers as well - then you could easily end up with this (skipping the boring bits):

You can "chain" any number of nodes together - in this case we've only used two.

The quick way

You can import entities into Maltego (also in the community edition) by copy and pasting it from text. Usually Maltego does a great job of figuring out what it is that you are pasting - but you can force the entity type by pre-pending it in the actual text. Check this out:

Of course, this does not give you the ability to actually create graphs - it just imports the nodes. But...wait..that's what you wanted right?

Tweet