Find Anyone Online Across 400+ Social Media Sites in Seconds

We all want to find our old friends or colleagues. There are many social media websites, but if we search one by one, it takes a lot of time and effort. Now we can use a tool called Sherlock. It helps us search 400+ social media platforms at the same time.  Sherlock works with a username. You just enter the username, and it checks around 400+ websites to see where that username exists.

This makes the process very fast and easy. With this tool, we can find profiles in a few minutes instead of hours. We can also search multiple usernames at once. But we should use this tool carefully and only for legal and ethical purposes.

Environment

  • OS: Kali Linux 64 bit

Installation Steps

root@kali:/home/iicybersecurity# git clone https://github.com/sherlock-project/sherlock
Cloning into 'sherlock'...
remote: Enumerating objects: 16, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (16/16), done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (12/12), done.
remote: Total 4485 (delta 6), reused 7 (delta 1), pack-reused 4469
Receiving objects: 100% (4485/4485), 15.30 MiB | 3.29 MiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (2837/2837), done.
  • Use cd command to enter into sherlock directory.
root@kali:/home/iicybersecurity# cd sherlock/
root@kali:/home/iicybersecurity/sherlock#
  • Next, use this command to install the requirements.
  • python3 -m pip install -r requirements.txt
root@kali:/home/iicybersecurity/sherlock# python3 -m pip install -r requirements.txt
Requirement already satisfied: beautifulsoup4>=4.8.0 in /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages (from -r requirements.txt (line 1)) (4.9.1)
Collecting bs4>=0.0.1
  Downloading bs4-0.0.1.tar.gz (1.1 kB)
Requirement already satisfied: certifi>=2019.6.16 in /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages (from -r requirements.txt (line 3)) (2020.4.5.1)
Requirement already satisfied: colorama>=0.4.1 in /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages (from -r requirements.txt (line 4)) (0.4.3)
Requirement already satisfied: lxml>=4.4.0 in /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages (from -r requirements.txt (line 5)) (4.5.2)
==============================================================================================SNIP=================================================================================================================================
    Found existing installation: PySocks 1.6.8
    Not uninstalling pysocks at /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages, outside environment /usr
    Can't uninstall 'PySocks'. No files were found to uninstall.
  Attempting uninstall: stem
    Found existing installation: stem 1.7.1
    Not uninstalling stem at /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages, outside environment /usr
    Can't uninstall 'stem'. No files were found to uninstall.
Successfully installed PySocks-1.7.1 bs4-0.0.1 requests-futures-1.0.0 stem-1.8.0 torrequest-0.1.0

  • Use this command to find the help options, python3 sherlock -h
root@kali:/home/iicybersecurity/sherlock# python3 sherlock -help

usage: sherlock [-h] [--version] [--verbose]
                [--folderoutput FOLDEROUTPUT] [--output OUTPUT]
                [--tor] [--unique-tor] [--csv] [--xlsx]
                [--site SITE_NAME] [--proxy PROXY_URL]
                [--json JSON_FILE] [--timeout TIMEOUT]
                [--print-all] [--print-found] [--no-color]
                [--browse] [--local] [--nsfw]
                USERNAMES [USERNAMES ...]

Sherlock: Find Usernames Across Social Networks (Version 0.14.3)

positional arguments:
  USERNAMES
      One or more usernames to check with social networks.
      Check similar usernames using {?} (replace to '_', '-', '.').

optional arguments:
  -h, --help
      Show this help message and exit

  --version
      Display version information and dependencies

  --verbose, -v, -d, --debug
      Display extra debugging information and metrics

  --folderoutput FOLDEROUTPUT, -fo FOLDEROUTPUT
      Save results for multiple usernames in a folder

  --output OUTPUT, -o OUTPUT
      Save result for a single username in a file

  --tor, -t
      Use Tor for requests (slower, requires Tor installed)

  --unique-tor, -u
      Use new Tor circuit for each request (slower)

  --csv
      Create CSV file

  --xlsx
      Create Excel (xlsx) file

  --site SITE_NAME
      Search only specific site(s)

  --proxy PROXY_URL, -p PROXY_URL
      Use proxy (example: socks5://127.0.0.1:1080)

  --json JSON_FILE, -j JSON_FILE
      Load data from JSON file (local or online)

  --timeout TIMEOUT
      Set request timeout in seconds (default: 60)

  --print-all
      Show sites where username not found

  --print-found
      Show sites where username found

  --no-color
      Disable colored output

  --browse, -b
      Open results in browser

  --local, -l
      Use local data.json file

  --nsfw
      Include NSFW sites in search
  • Now, use this command to view the user’s profile on all social media platforms, python3 sherlock <username>
Sherlock - User's profiles
Sherlock – User’s profiles
  • Successfully we got the user’s profile URLs, let’s open this URL in the browser to view the user’s profile.
Sherlock - User's profile
Sherlock – User’s profile
  • Successfully we got the user’s profile.
  • We can also search for multiple users using, python3 sherlock –site instagram ribika pooja
root@kali:/home/iicybersecurity/sherlock# python3 sherlock --site instagram ribika pooja
[*] Checking username ribika on:
[+] Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ribika
 
[*] Checking username pooja on:
[+] Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/pooja
  • Here, we got users profiles.

Conclusion

As we saw how this sherlock tool crawled all the social media platforms for users profile and it’s very easy for investigation purpose.