Screencast: Employ the FOCA tool as a metadata extractor
Users and enterprises often post documents, PDFs and other seemingly innocent files to their websites without so much as a second thought toward the security implications. Unfortunately, this leaves plenty of metadata, or "hidden" data, exposed to anyone with enough malicious intent to find it. A metadata extractor is needed to find this data, with FOCA Free being more than capable of performing such metadata analysis.
In this SearchSecurity.com screencast, Mike McLaughlin shows viewers how to use the FOCA tool to extract metadata concerning user, system and software information, among others. The FOCA tool easily exposes sensitive information about passwords, emails, servers and more that could be invaluable to an attacker. FOCA Free also includes a tool to search caches and identify any files that may be indexed by search engines Google and Bing. When the need arises to figure out what data may be unintentionally available on a website, the FOCA tool is a powerful metadata extractor that is free to download.
About the expert:
Mike McLaughlin is a penetration tester working for First Base Technologies, an information security consultancy in the UK. Mike's daily work consists of both internal and external network based penetration testing, Web application penetration testing, and social engineering.