Sherlock – Passive Reconnaissance Tool

Sherlock is a very useful tool to gather all the social media accounts of with the help of a username. It would then hunt down the social media accounts, a particular username matches with.

It is not included in the Kali Linux so we have to install it manually by going to the GitHub and cloning it to our Kali Linux.

Fire up your Linux terminal, preferably Kali Linux, and enter the following commands.

$ cd Desktop/

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

Now, the process will start and a folder named “sherlock” will appear on your Kali’s Desktop.

Now, enter the following commands,

$ cd sherlock

$ python3 -m pip install -r requirements.txt

These commands will start the installation of the requirements of the sherlock otherwise sherlock tool won’t work.

After the completion of the process, enter the below commands,

$ cd sherlock

$ python3 sherlock.py username

These commands will start searching for the users all over the internet on various social media platform about the username you specify.

Enter any username of your choice in place of “username” in the command lines above and hit enter.

For example,

$ python3 sherlock.py elonmusk

This command will start searching for the username “elonmusk” on almost every social media website.

As you can see, it showed that almost every website has the account name elonmusk on them. This doesn’t mean that the “Elon Musk” is running those social media accounts. Those accounts may be made by someone else because Elon Musk is quite popular.

Search for any username which you think may be unique so that only the real person holds those social media accounts.

Another such similar and great tool is social-analyzer.

If sherlock doesn’t work for you or doesn’t show any results, try installing social-analyzer using the steps we followed previously.

Search for it, install it with instructions from its GitHub page and try checking your usernames with this tool.

First step down. But you should never limit yourself to only the tools here. There are many more out there and some could be even better for you than these. At this link right here,

https://securitytrails.com/blog/osint-tools You can take a look at top 25 OSIN (Open-Source Intelligence) Tools and feel free to test all of them out!

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