Maltego - For the PI and Security Director of the Future

via techhive.com...
What Maltego does is quickly and succinctly draws on public data sources to put together a graphical digital footprint...

Click to enlarge.

Maltego is highly efficient at quickly assembling digital crumbs and linking those pieces together, which would be tedious work otherwise. 

Roelof Temmingh (co-creator) used Maltego to search Twitter with coordinates for the vicinity of the NSA's parking lot...

Temmingh pulled up a web of scattered tweets in Maltego. He picked out one person...

Then Maltego combed social networking sites, checking sources such as Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn. An identical photo linked the person's Facebook and MySpace page. From there, Maltego spotted more information. After a day of searching, Maltego discovered the person's email address, date of birth, travel history, employment, and education history.

"This is about a day's worth of digging around," Temmingh said. "It's not weeks and weeks."

Other interesting information can come from EXIF (exchangeable image file) data, which is information often embedded in a photograph... (more)

An investigative tool, and vulnerability assessment tool. For cutting-edge PIs, a  competitive advantage. For the average security director, a mini FBICIANSA. ~Kevin