using foca to extract data from website

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FOCA is an excellent website reconnaissance tool with lots of interesting features and capabilities. Remember, before attacking any website or domain, it is critical to gather as much information as possible. From this information, you can determine the attack that is most likely to work against that site or network.

In this tutorial, we will looking at FOCA’s ability to find, download, and retrieve files from websites with the file’s metadata.

This metadata can give us insight into such information as the users (could be critical in cracking passwords), operating system (exploits are OS-specific), email addresses (possibly for social engineering), the software used (once again, exploits are OS-, and more and more often, application-specific), and if we are really lucky, passwords.

Disclaimer – Our tutorials are designed to aid aspiring pen testers/security enthusiasts in learning new skills, we only recommend that you test this tutorial on a system that belongs to YOU. We do not accept responsibility for anyone who thinks it’s a good idea to try to use this to attempt to hack systems that do not belong to you

Step 1: Downlaod FOCA for Windows

First, let’s download FOCA Free 3.0 for Windows.

Step 2: Choose Where You Save Results

When you install FOCA, you will greeted with a screen like that below. The first task we need to do is to start a new project and then tell FOCA where we want to save our results.

I created a new directory at c:\foca and will save all my results there. Of course, you can save your results wherever is convenient for you, or use the default temp directory.

Step 3: Create a Project

In this tutorial, I will be starting with a project named after the information security training company, SANS, which is located at sans.org, and I will be saving my results to c:\foca.

Step 4: Getting the Metadata

Once I create my project, I can go to the object explorer to the far left and select Metadata. This enables us to pull the metadata from the files on the website that contain metadata. Files such as .pdf, .doc, .xls, etc. all contain metadata that could be useful in your hack of your target.

When you select metadata, you will pull up a screen like that below. In our case here, we will be searching sans.org for .doc files, so the syntax to be placed in the search window is:

site:sans.org filetype:doc

This will search the entire sans.org website, looking for .doc files. When I hit the Search button next to the window, it will begin to search and find all the .doc files at sans.org.

Of course, if you were searching for .pdf files or other filetypes, you would put in that filetype. You can also search for multiple filetypes by listing them after filetype, such as:

site:sans.org filetype:pdf,doc,xls

Step 5: Download the Files

Once FOCA is done retrieving a list of all the .doc files, we can then right-click on any file and download the file to our hard drive, download all the files, or analyze the metadata. I chose to download all the .doc files I found at sans.org.

Step 6: Collect & Analyze the Metadata

Now that we have downloaded all the .doc files, I chose to analyze all the metadata in them. Microsoft’s Office files collect significant amounts of data as they are being created and edited that we can then extract.

When we expand the Metadata folder in the object explorer, you can see that we have 156 .doc files and 2 .docx files.

The Types of Metadata Collected

Just beneath the Metadata documents folder is another folder titled, Metadata Summary. We can click on it and it reveals the type of metadata is has collected from the files. This metadata is broken into eight (8) categories:

1. Users
2. Folders
3. Printers
4. Software
5. Emails
6. Operating Systems
7. Passwords
8. Servers

Let’s take a look at Users first. When we click on users, we can see that FOCA has collected the names of every user that worked on those files.