Best Free and Open Source Social Networking Software

Sherlock – find social media accounts by username

Last Updated on June 28, 2024

Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT) is defined as intelligence produced by collecting, evaluating and analyzing publicly available information with the purpose of answering a specific intelligence question. If the question is to probe information about yourself, or people that you know, sherlock might be a useful tool.

Sherlock is billed as a powerful command line tool to find usernames across a large number social networks. It requires Python 3.6 or higher and works on Linux, macOS, and Windows.

This is free and open source software.

Installation

There are a variety of ways of installing Sherlock without polluting a machine. In a virtual environment, you can edit and not damage the files of the main development environment. If you install a lot of software with pip without using a virtual environment, you’ll probably end up with a broken system eventually.

We’ll install Sherlock in a isolated Python environment. When used from within a virtual environment, installation tools such as pip install Python packages into this virtual environment without needing to be explicitly told.

$ sudo apt install python3-venv -y

$ mkdir pytorch_env
$ cd pytorch_env

Create the environment:

$ python3 -m venv pytorch_env
$ source pytorch_env/bin/activate

Clone the project’s GitHub repository with the command:

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

Now change into the sherlock directory.

$ cd sherlock

The final step is to install the project’s requirements.

$ python3 -m pip install -r requirements.txt

Installing Sherlock

Next page: Page 2 – In Operation and Summary

Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction and Installation
Page 2 – In Operation and Summary

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