Hey there 👋 ! Today, we will hunt down social media accounts across social networks by using a great tool: Sherlock. This tool allows us to search for Social Media accounts by their usernames.
Disclaimer
This is a legit hacking tool part of OSINT and it can be legal or illegal to use depending on the intentions. Use at your own risk!
🔸 Wait, what is OSINT?
Open-source intelligence (OSINT) is the collection and analysis of data gathered from open sources (overt and publicly available sources) to produce actionable intelligence.
Imagine going to each website searching for a particular user name😒. You will fall in love with this tool!
I love automated web scraping and I usually find it fun with Python and today we shall see the power of Sherlock!
🔸 What is Sherlock ?
Sherlock is a python based tool that can reveal many user accounts created by the same person in multiple social media platforms with their screen_name or username.
🔹Sherlock Installation
I tried pip installation but it turned out to be a waste of time and it may not work for you too. So the easy and straightway method I did was to head over to the repo.
You can clone it or download the zip if you don't have git installed.
# clone the repo
git clone https://github.com/sherlock-project/sherlock.git
# change the working directory to sherlock
cd sherlock
# install the requirements
python -m pip install -r requirements.txt
🔹Usage
cd sherlock again to locate the inner sherlock.py file
python sherlock.py --help
🔹 Single Search
python sherlock.py Atuhaire
By executing it you should start seeing as output this:
The highlighted link is my all-in-one link that you can use to connect with me on my various social media accounts. Check it out here!
🔹 Multiple Search
python sherlock.py user1 user2 user3
Wow!
We searched for usernames across 324 current Social Networks that are supported at the time of writing this!
🔹Site List
Knowing what Social Media Platforms Sherlock operates is very important.
Sherlock developers created a file in which there is a list of all the platforms Sherlock uses.
In the project structure, there is a site_list.py that generates the listing of supported sites which can be found in sites.md and also organizes all the sites in alphanumeric order.
They also happen to have a list of removed sites!
🔹Advanced Usage
You can do more than the basic usage in finding usernames by running py sherlock.py --help.
🛠 --csv
Create Comma-Separated Values (CSV) File.
🛠 --folderoutput FOLDEROUTPUT, -fo FOLDEROUTPUT
If using multiple usernames, the output of the results will be saved to this folder.
🛠 --timeout TIMEOUT
Time (in seconds) to wait for a response to requests. The default timeout is infinity. A longer timeout will be more likely to get results from slow sites.
eg: py sherlock.py user --timeout 1 --csv
I would prefer .csv because it is more detailed than the default .txt file
🔹 Sherlock API
This REST API is built on top of the Django REST Framework (known as DRF). You would need at least the fundamental knowledge about DRF in order to do development with it.
Visit API repo 🚀🚀
That's it!
If you want. you can contribute to the repo and if you want to modify it to your needs, feel free it has an MIT licence.
I am currently editing the files to suit my need and I will update yall with what I will have managed to change and achieve.
Go read more from the project website
🔸 Conclusion ✌
Again, this article is for educational purposes and I am not responsible for any intended personal use case.
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