Installing Maltego on Kasm Workspaces for OSINT

Open Source Intelligence is the process of collecting and gathering interesting information about a target from publicly available (open source) resources. OSINT plays a major role in Ethical Hacking because it is a skill that every red-teamer needs to possess to successfully conduct an investigation on the target company/organization and potentially find anything confidential.

When it comes to OSINT, there are many tools and frameworks available to ease the process, among which Maltego is considered to be one of the OP!

In this post, I show you how to install and set up Maltego privately so that you don't end up leaking your personal identity while conducting private investigations with OSINT.

We will be making use of the concept called Docker Streaming, using which one can create a container of a docker image (in this case, Maltego) and stream it directly from a web browser! That's right! We will be making use of Kasm Workspaces for this.

You can install Kasm Workspaces on your local Linux Machine, but I prefer installing it on a Cloud Instance just so that I can be sure the docker containers I run with it are not actually running on my personal computer, but on a virtual computer that is located somewhere else. This way, I am not putting my personal computer at risk, and it also enables me to hide my personal identity online (by choosing a cloud provider that does not collect information about its users).

System Requirements

The minimum system requirements to install Kasm Workspaces are as follows:

​CPU Cores	2
​Memory (RAM)	4 GB
Storage (SSD)	50 GB

Kasm works on most Linux distributions like Ubuntu 18.04 / 20.04 / 22.04, Debian 9 / 10 / 11, CentOS 7 / 8 / 9, Oracle Linux 7 / 8 / 9, Raspberry Pi OS (Debian) 10 / 11, etc.

You can find the full list of supported operating systems here.

Installing Kasm Workspaces

Step 1. Create a swap partition

sudo dd if=/dev/zero bs=1M count=1024 of=/mnt/1GiB.swap
sudo chmod 600 /mnt/1GiB.swap
sudo mkswap /mnt/1GiB.swap
sudo swapon /mnt/1GiB.swap

Step 2. Make the swap file available on boot

echo '/mnt/1GiB.swap swap swap defaults 0 0' | sudo tee -a /etc/fstab

Step 3. Download Kasm Workspaces.

cd /tmp
curl -O https://kasm-static-content.s3.amazonaws.com/kasm_release_1.12.0.d4fd8a.tar.gz

Step 4. Extract with tar and install

tar -xf kasm_release*.tar.gz
sudo bash kasm_release/install.sh

Once Kasm is installed, you will be given the credentials to log in to Kasm, make sure you note them down. You can also change these randomly generated credentials later.

Now, go to https://<YOUR_IP>:443 in your browser, this will take you to the login page of Kasm Workspaces. Log in with your credentials that are generated during the installation. You will now be taken to your dashboard.

Installing Maltego on Kasm Workspaces

Maltego is not available by default on Kasm, but we can easily install it manually from this docker image.

To install Maltego, Go to "Admin", select "Workspaces" and then click "Add Workspace"

In the next screen, set the values as follows:

Workspace Type: Container
Friendly Name: Maltego
Description: Maltego
Enabled: Yes
Docker Image: kasmweb/maltego:develop
Cores: 1
Memory: 2048
GPU Count: 0
CPU Allocation Method: Inherit
Docker Registry: https://index.docker.io/v1/

Finally, click on "Submit" and this will create the image.

After Kasm is done downloading the image of Maltego from docker hub, you can find Maltego on your Workspaces page.

Just click on Maltego and then click "Launch Session" to create a container of this image, and voila! A fully functional Maltego opens up in a new tab in your browser!

Once you are done using Maltego, you can simply kill your session and everything will be destroyed - like you never even used it!