Nowadays almost all Internet users have social media accounts and almost everything is virtual. To find other people’s information on the Internet is not easy, but it takes tricks. It is difficult if the information of the person you are looking for is hidden or the account has been deleted. There are 2 ways you can search the person’s friends and family members for more information or you can search the other social media accounts of the person. Ideally, you should do both, but in this article, I will focus on the second way to find other people’s information on the Internet.
Assuming that we already know the username of the person we are looking for, I will show you three different but very similar tools so that you can search for your target account on multiple social media platforms. festival.
It’s important to emphasize that tools like these may not be 100% accurate. They just save you a lot of time, from which you can do other tasks, such as analyzing practically all the information collected.
How to find other people’s information on the Internet
WhatsMyName
The first tool I would recommend to find other people’s information is WhatsMyName. In particular, I want to show you the web application that OSINT Combine Developed in partnership with the original author, Micah(@webbreacher) and other WhatsMyName developers. The interface is extremely easy to use and requires no further explanation.
Just copy the username and paste it in the search bar. To refine your searches, you can select a category on the right side. For example, if you know that your target is a gamer, you can check the gaming sites first and then the others. In general, I recommend choosing ‘All‘ because you can find potential information.
In its original form, WhatsMyName is based on Python. WhatsMyName’s GitHub repository can be accessed here. Since then, it has been integrated into several other OSINT tools, such as Spiderfoot, Recon-NG, and Sn0int.
Namecheckup.com
The next tool is Namecheckup. It is actually built to allow users to check usernames on social networks and domains on multiple platforms. Still, it’s a great tool that perfectly suits our investigative needs.
The website has a beautiful interface, is extremely easy to use and needs no further explanation. To demonstrate its capabilities, here is a quick example with the UK prime minister, Boris Johnson (BorisJohnson – see Figure 1).
For my purposes, I’m only interested in the gray cells – these are the cells that contain the username. The next step, you will have to verify the account. To do so, simply click on the grayed-out box and proceed with your verification steps.
Going back to Boris Johnson, the proposed Twitter account has been correctly identified (Figure 2); however, the suggested Instagram account is not Boris’s account (see Figure 2). This is something you will likely encounter often. In this case, try changing the username and repeat the search. Or, go directly to the platform and search for the target account, using different usernames as well as real names. In this case, I decided to go directly to Instagram and search for Boris Johnson, I finally found the right account (Figure 2).
Sherlock
The last tool that I would like to recommend is Sherlock, which is provided by the Sherlock Project which is very useful for finding other people’s information on social networks. Similar to UserRecon, Sherlocks allows you to easily search for users across multiple platforms. In fact, at the time of writing this blog, Sherlock has covered 306 social media platforms. It is a very powerful Python-based command line tool, also actively maintained by developers. If you don’t know much about your goals, I strongly recommend Sherlock as it has a large number of platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and more.
Sherlock is easy to use and doesn’t need much explanation. To install it, simply follow the steps on the GitHub page. Or read my Sherlock tutorial here. However, there are two things I want to emphasize:
First, you can search for multiple usernames on all platforms. This is especially useful when dealing with multiple targets or trying different variations of a single username. To do so, simply add the space-separated username to the end of the command. Eg:
Python3 sherlock.py lorandbodo dutch_osintguy technisette
If you want to do your searches under high OPSEC, Sherlock will help you too. You can search through proxies, proxy lists, and even the TOR network. For more information, check out the project’s GitHub page here.