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How Do I Hunt Down Social Media Accounts Using Sherlock?

"Social media is one of the easiest platform for hackers to find out information about any particular person or target. - Ankit Dobhal"

Today! I wake up very late in the morning,& later at 9:30 I had a breakfast.
Then something happened one of my friend sent me a link about a tool Sherlock which could hunt down social media accounts with username.

Well as I usually do !!
I sat down in a cheer in front my computer with a cup of coffee,boot up my operating system.
Then I go through github link of Sherlock & started learning about that tool.

What is Sherlock?

Sherlock is a python based tool which can reveal many user accounts created by the same person in the multiple social media platforms with their screen_name or username.
sherlock script is written on python. You can checkout the whole script from its github link.

How I Hunt Down Social media Accounts With Sherlock?

Step 1 -> Installed Sherlock
In a terminal window I copied the link of sherlock from github and run following commands.


Note : Python3 and python3-pip have to be installed.

To get help about Sherlock I tried python sherlock -h command from inside
the Sherlock folder.

Step 2 -> Identify screen name
Just after reading the help I was ready to start script.But wait how to find out screen name of my target? Then I found screen name of my target by running a Google search and "Twitter."

My target was Sir Robert Baptiste aka elliot_alderson. He is french security researcher & I admire his work on security a lot.

Step 3 -> Scan for accounts
Then finally I ran sherlock.py script with following commands in my terminal screen python target_name -r --print-found to find out all social media account of my target.


Note : '-r' argument in the above command will organize the list of found
accounts by which websites are most popular,& '--print-found' will
show all accounts in terminal screen.

So as you can see above example that how I hunt down account all over internet using sherlock.py script.I also tried to contribute some file in this tool You can go through with this link to find out sherlock tool.
-> https://github.com/sherlock-project

Top comments (2)

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diogoppedro profile image
Diogo Pacheco Pedro

Thanks for that. Looks super fun.

I will use to check out if my username is all over the web or not. Pretty awesome tool.

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atharvakadlag profile image
Atharva Kadlag

hey, is there any way i could use the sherlock in my a python script?