Sherlock | Hunt Down Social Media Accounts

In this article, we are going to talk about an open-source tool named open-source to hunt down social media accounts with their usernames. Finding social media accounts for any username is one of the most important parts of OSINT investigations and the tool sherlock made it really easy to do, In this article, we are going to see how to install and use it.

What is Sherlock?

Sherlock is a powerful command-line tool provided by Sherlock Project, can be used to find usernames across many social networks. It requires Python 3.6 or higher and works on macOS, Linux, and Windows.

Basically, Sherlock is an open-source python project available on GitHub. You can input all the usernames and it will return all the URLs of all the related social media accounts.

Installation

Sherlock is a python based tool so if you have python installed you can run it directory after following a few steps.

For any OS/Termux(android)

Open the terminal and type the following commands

# clone the repo
$ git clone https://github.com/sherlock-project/sherlock.git

# change the working directory to sherlock
$ cd sherlock

# install the requirements
$ python3 -m pip install -r requirements.txt

How to use?

After installing it you can type:

python3 sherlock --help

The above command will show you the help menu of the sherlock.

Help Menu

$ python3 sherlock --help
usage: sherlock [-h] [--version] [--verbose] [--folderoutput FOLDEROUTPUT]
                [--output OUTPUT] [--tor] [--unique-tor] [--csv]
                [--site SITE_NAME] [--proxy PROXY_URL] [--json JSON_FILE]
                [--timeout TIMEOUT] [--print-all] [--print-found] [--no-color]
                [--browse] [--local]
                USERNAMES [USERNAMES ...]

Sherlock: Find Usernames Across Social Networks (Version 0.14.0)

positional arguments:
  USERNAMES             One or more usernames to check with social networks.

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
                        If using multiple usernames, the output of the results
                        will be saved to this folder.
  --output OUTPUT, -o OUTPUT
                        If using single username, the output of the result
                        will be saved to this file.
  --tor, -t             Make requests over Tor; increases runtime; requires
                        Tor to be installed and in system path.
  --unique-tor, -u      Make requests over Tor with new Tor circuit after each
                        request; increases runtime; requires Tor to be
                        installed and in system path.
  --csv                 Create Comma-Separated Values (CSV) File.
  --site SITE_NAME      Limit analysis to just the listed sites. Add multiple
                        options to specify more than one site.
  --proxy PROXY_URL, -p PROXY_URL
                        Make requests over a proxy. e.g.
                        socks5://127.0.0.1:1080
  --json JSON_FILE, -j JSON_FILE
                        Load data from a JSON file or an online, valid, JSON
                        file.
  --timeout TIMEOUT     Time (in seconds) to wait for response to requests.
                        Default timeout is infinity. A longer timeout will be
                        more likely to get results from slow sites. On the
                        other hand, this may cause a long delay to gather all
                        results.
  --print-all           Output sites where the username was not found.
  --print-found         Output sites where the username was found.
  --no-color            Don't color terminal output
  --browse, -b          Browse to all results on default browser.
  --local, -l           Force the use of the local data.json file.

Now, if you just have to search one username you can type:

python3 sherlock user123

If you want to search multiple usernames you can type:

python3 sherlock user1 user2 user3

Basically, in the Multiple Username case accounts found will be stored in an individual text file with the corresponding username (e.g user123.txt).

How to Run Sherlock Online?

There is no official online website to use the tool. But as this tool is an open-source project and is based on python you can use platforms like “repl.it” to run the tool.

Here we are going to use REPL to use the sherlock online.

1. Open https://repl.it/github/sherlock-project/sherlock

2. In the Repl’s Console:

$ python3 -m pip install -r requirements.txt

3. Then after installing all the required modules you can run it just like you run it on your terminal.

$ python3 sherlock --help

the above command will give you the exact same output as it gives on your OS terminal’s

Official Demo

Conclusion

Now you have properly installed and used this awesome tool. As it is an open-source project, one has the full permission to customize and modify it according to your need. One of the customizations you can do is automate the whole social media hunting process. You can also check your username for security reasons. There are some Reference links provided in the next section which will help you understand the topic of OSINT more widely.

Refrence Links

1. Official Github
2. Replt.it Sherlock
3. OSINT Blog
4. Profil3r ( another similar tool )
5. Our Blog Page