FOCA
Description
FOCA (Fingerprinting Organizations with Collected Archives) is a metadata extraction and fingerprinting tool. It is considered the best tool for gathering information from websites by harvesting and analyzing metadata from publicly available documents (PDF, DOCX, XLSX, etc.). It extracts usernames, software versions, email addresses, operating systems, and other sensitive metadata.
Usage 1: Harvesting metadata from a target website
FOCA is a GUI-based tool used to scan a target domain, discover publicly available documents, download them, and extract metadata for reconnaissance.
Context:
FOCA is listed as the "best tool" for harvesting metadata from targets. It works by:
- Specifying a target domain
- Using search engines to find documents (PDF, DOC, XLSX, PPT, etc.) hosted on the target
- Downloading the discovered documents
- Extracting metadata (usernames, software versions, paths, email addresses, OS info)
Related Google Dork for finding documents:
website.com filetype:pdf
Usage 2: Information gathering in combination with other tools
FOCA is used alongside other reconnaissance tools like TheHarvester and Shodan for comprehensive information gathering.
Related resources:
- Shodan: https://shodan.io
- Shodan Exploits: https://exploits.shodan.io
- TheHarvester (alternative command-line harvesting tool)