NameChck is a really useful service for quickly finding online accounts associated with a specific alias. This blog post showcases our new Maltego transform that queries NameChk to find social accounts across a wide range of social networks.
The transform runs on an alias entity and returns entities that represent different online accounts. Running the transform To Social Account [Using NameChk] on the aliases used by Paterva employees returns the results below:
Clearly Andrew is the most socially active Paterva employee...;)
In the Detail View of the entities that we get back there is a link to the actual social account:
These social accounts can now be manually inspected for accuracy.
The NameChk API is subject to rate limiting. By default our transform will use Paterva's limited API key but to avoid being rate limited you can register your own API key from the NameChk website. You should then replace the default value with your API key under the NameChk APIKEY transform setting.
Simply click on the 'Update transforms' button in the Transform Hub next to the Start Page - the NameChk transform is part of the standard transforms supported by Paterva.
Enjoy responsibly,
PR
The transform runs on an alias entity and returns entities that represent different online accounts. Running the transform To Social Account [Using NameChk] on the aliases used by Paterva employees returns the results below:
Clearly Andrew is the most socially active Paterva employee...;)
In the Detail View of the entities that we get back there is a link to the actual social account:
Pivoting from existing alias entities
In Maltego we already have a couple of transforms that are useful for finding aliases associated with a person. Our Flickr and MySpace transforms both run on email addresses and return the accounts associated with the address as well as additional aliases that are used on that account. This provides a great way for finding aliases that a person might go by. Next with the use of our new NameChk transform we can quickly pivot from these aliases to find what social networks they have been used on.
In the example below we start by running the transform emailToMySpaceAccount on the email address andrew@punks.co.za which returns a MySpace account entity as well as three additional aliases associated with the account. Namely zapunk, AndrewMacPherson and Andrew MacPherson. The alias AndrewMacPherson is quite common and could be anyone however the zapunk looks interesting so next we run the transform To Social Account [Using NameChk] which returns links to 10 different social accounts that have a user with the alias zapunk.
These social accounts can now be manually inspected for accuracy.
API keys
Getting the transform
Simply click on the 'Update transforms' button in the Transform Hub next to the Start Page - the NameChk transform is part of the standard transforms supported by Paterva.
Enjoy responsibly,
PR
