Nasty Maltego Bug
There was an update from Maltego 4.7.0 to Maltego 4.8.0 on August 30th, which my update process just picked up yesterday. This new piece of software is absolutely terrible for me.
Will open the MAGA Meltdown graph, now at 8,300 entities.
Will NOT permit large volume changes such as resetting all bookmarks to the default gray color, gets stuck clocking for 90+ minutes, never completes.
Will NOT reliably save that file after even a tiny change, such as selecting a different bookmark color for a single node.
Automatic graph journaling is nice in theory, but this software truncates large files to empty.
Automated recovery does work the next time you start, you can open the recovered file, but then can not DO anything with it, as described above.
Any files created with 4.8.0 will not open if you revert your system to 4.7.0.
Maltego recommends Java 17, my system has
openjdk-17-jre:amd64 17.0.12+7-1ubuntu2~24.04
Restoring my system to functional required the following:
dpkg -r maltego
dpkg —purge maltego
rm -rf ~/.maltego
rm -rf /tmp/Maltego*
Luckily, the Maltego site doesn’t play games with download links. The 480 software is offered and you can simply replace the 8 with a 7 to get the older version.
https://downloads.maltego[.]com/maltego-v4/linux/Maltego.v4.8.0.deb
https://downloads.maltego[.]com/maltego-v4/linux/Maltego.v4.7.0.deb
This was a PITA for me, but not a disaster. Maltego began acting up due to this large graph size in August of last year, and I began storing every article I processed using a YYYY-MM-DD-<topic> file name format. Here’s a sample of those updates from earlier this year.
2024-01-08-Musk-Antivax-article.mtgl
2024-01-09-MikeFlynn-PeterGrant.mtgl
2024-01-25-AntonPostolnikov.mtgl
2024-01-25-Wikileaks.mtgl
2024-02-03-TMTG.mtgl
2024-02-15-AlexanderSmirnov-indictment.mtgl
2024-02-27-DimitriSimes.mtgl
2024-03-14-Smirnov-ETT.mtgl
2024-03-15-Grayzone-MP.mtgl
2024-03-17-Iranians.mtgl
2024-03-17-Mifsud-DeepHistory.mtgl
2024-03-18-Grayzone-MP.mtgl
2024-03-18-PressTV-no-docs.mtgl
2024-03-19-DarkShadows.mtgl
2024-03-20-AndreiIllarionov.mtgl
2024-03-20-TrueTheVote-RW.mtgl
2024-03-27-Tsargard-INCOMPLETE.mtgl
Once I understood that 4.8.0 was not going to work, it took less than half an hour to expunge the new software, start with a two week old backup of the MAGA Meltdown graph, and merge ten updates.
I have two updates that were done with 4.8.0 that I can not open and they’re both substantive. I’m going to ZFS snapshot a VM that has Maltego in it, update its Maltego, convert these two files to GraphML, then revert the VM to the snapshot.
So there you have it. I’ve been a paying customer for twelve years and this is the first major bug I’ve encountered that cost me work. Thanks to the manner in which I do things it wasn’t difficult for me to recover. I imagine those who fully trust the software might be in for a really long week, particularly if they have mostly smaller graphs, then discover this problem on a large graph after some time has elapsed.