Social Network Special Ops: Extending data visualization tools for faster Pwnage

If you’re ever in a position when you need to pwn criminals via social networks or see where Tony Hawk likes to hide skateboards around the world, this talk is for you. The talk is delivered in two parts, both of which are intended to shine a fun light on visual social network analysis. The first part introduces how you can extend the powerful data visualization tool, Maltego to speed up and automate the data mining and analysis of social networks. I’ll show how I analyzed skateboard legend, Tony Hawk’s twitter hunt and highlight how you could use the same techniques to set up your very own backyard miniature ECHELON. I focus specifically on Twitter and Facebook, demonstrating how you can map and analyze social relationships using the Twitter API's, publicly available Facebook profiles, screen scraping and some clunky regex. The second part chronicles my adventures in using these techniques to enumerate a 419 scam, exposing deeper more sinister links to organized crime resulting in the scammers making an offer to payback some money.

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