In this tutorial, I'm going to show you an easy and effective technique to extract metadata literally in seconds using exiftool. Metadata is nothing more than "data of data", which is actually a lot. They used metadata to catch McAfee when he went AWOL last year. Not many people knew of exiftool in the Backtrack 5 series and I was quite upset when it didn't come with Kali and I am not a fan of the current image forensics tools that came with Kali so I went and installed it. Exiftool goes way beyond this tutorial as you can read, write, and manipluate metadata in such files as photos, microsoft office documents, xml and more. This is VERY valuable information during any penetration test. I'm not going to show you how to manipulate metadata yet and this time I'm not going to assume you're new to Linux, but here is a Cheat Sheet if you need it.

Let's move on to something even more important, analyzing metadata from a PDF file. As every hacker knows, the more information you have, the more successful your exploit will be and good hackers are never lazy. PDF metadata is a vital piece of information if you can get it from your victim.
I just did a quick Google file:pdf search and downloaded the first result which was something from Ohio State University, called "lesson2.pdf". We're going to extract the metadata and save it to a text file, because you need to keep the information you gather about your target to be successful right? Yes!