Backtrack 4: Information Gathering: Archive: Metagoofil – Extract metadata from public documents
One good thing about writing articles on tools is you get to test out lots of different stuff you may not have normally used. One of these tools for me was Metagoofil. Metagoofil is a tool for written in Python for extracting the metadata from public documents (pdf,doc,xls,ppt) available in the target websites. This information could be useful because you can get valid usernames, or people names, for using later in brute force password attacks (vpn, ftp, webapps etc.). The tool first queries Google for different filetypes that can have useful metadata (pdf, doc, xls,ppt,etc), then it downloads those documents to the disk and run the program “extract” on every file. It will generate a HTML page with the results of the metadata extracted, plus a list of potential usernames.