FOCA Explained: Metadata OSINT and Document Scanning for PenTest+
FOCA — Fingerprinting Organizations with Collected Archives — is an OSINT tool that finds documents published on a target's websites, downloads them, and extracts the metadata hidden inside. It is a reconnaissance tool, and what it reveals about most organizations is uncomfortable. Every document an organization publishes carries metadata nobody looked at. FOCA collects it at scale and assembles it into a map of the internal network and the people on it. What It Does, Step by Step Search. FOCA queries search engines for documents on a target domain, using operators equivalent to site:target.com filetype:pdf across many file types. Download. It retrieves every document it finds — PDFs, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OpenOffice formats, and more. Extract. It parses each file's metadata. Correlate. This is the valuable part. It aggregates findings across hundreds of documents to build a picture no single file would reveal. What Comes Out Usernames. Document autho...