On the surface spaces of the WWW and Internet, organizations and individuals have long created a public face to emphasize their respective brands, showcase their credibility, and interact with others in often very public ways. These surface spaces include Websites, social media platforms, virtual worlds, interactive game spaces, content sharing sites, social networking sites, microblogging sites, wikis, blogs (Web logs), collaborative work sites, and email systems. Beneath the glittering surfaces are electronic understructures, which enable the mapping of networks (based on physical location or organization or URL), the tracking of inter-personal relationships between various accounts, the geolocation of various electronic data to the analog physical world, the de-anonymizing of aliases (to disallow pseudonymity), and the tracking of people to their contact information (digital and physical). Maltego Radium is a penetration testing tool that enables such crawls of publicly available information or Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT) to identify and describe electronic network structures for a range of applications. Further, this information is represented in a number of interactive node-link diagrams in both 2D and 3D for further insights. There is also an export capability for full reportage of the extracted information. This chapter introduces the tool and identifies some practical ways this has been used to “package” fresh understandings for enhanced awareness and decision-making in a higher education context.
On the algebraic structure of link-diagrams on a 2-dimensional surface
