Sherlock — Social Media Hunting Using Your Private Detective in Kali Linux
What comes to your mind when someone mentions Sherlock? Well, probably most people would think of a tall man with his British accent walking around 221B Baker Street looking for a new crime scene. That’s not entirely wrong, but today I’m gonna show you another Sherlock, the different one. Smart, sophisticated, and definitely going to be your personal detective. Sherlock will hunt down any social media accounts through various platforms for you. Command him, and watch him do the work.
Definition
Sherlock is a python open-source tool available at GitHub. Sherlock provides a powerfull command-line tool called ‘Sherlock’ to find usernames on 300 sites across various platforms. When researching a person using open source intelligence, Sherlock will help you to find clues. With Sherlock, the job to collect pieces by pieces of informations and tie them into bigger picture will be easier.
Before we jump into further step, i want to give a disclaimer. This article only for educational purposes, any further harm because of this, definitely not my responsibility.
Installation
First, open Sherlock Project in GitHub and copy the link to download the project. Link: https://github.com/sherlock-project/sherlock. Sherlock is under the MIT license, sdushantha or well known as Siddarth Dushantha is the contributor of this project. Thanks to him and GitHub.
After you copied the link (highlighted in yellow) go to your Kali Linux’s terminal. Then move to Desktop. You can use the following command. The command ‘cd’ is mainly used for changing the directory.
cd Desktop
Since you are on the Desktop now, I want you to create a new directory under the name sherlock. Follow the command below. The command ‘mkdir’ stands for make directory.
mkdir sherlock
Now move yourself to the directory you just have created, yup the sherlock.
cd sherlock
We’re almost close, in the very beginning I ask you to copy the link from Sherlock Project, now it’s time to install the tool using this command in the sherlock directory. Clone the tool using this command.
git clone https://github.com/sherlock-project/sherlock.git
Great, you just have been downloaded the tool. Now list out the contents in it, use this command.
ls
As you can see here is a new directory of the tool. Use the following command to move to this directory.
cd sherlock
To list out the contents of the tool use the following command.
ls
To run the tool you must install the requirements, I have highlighted it in yellow colour . Do this command.
python3 -m pip install -r requirements.txt
After we fulfilled the requirements, now it’s time to test and run the tool. Search any usernames, it can be the target’s username on Twitter, Instagram, or anything. Start the investigation using this formula.
python3 sherlock username
Open Source Intelligence
Now that we can see how the script runs, I’ll show you how OSINT (Open Source Intelligence) takes part. I’ll make sure you understand that this is not only Sherlock’s job to investigate the target, but you, his comrade, need to take part as John H. Watson.
Open Source Intelligence or OSINT is mainly used for those who work to solve criminal cases online, it refers to any intelligence gathered from publicly accessible resources. Learning how to perform OSINT is not a rocket science, there are several essential points we need to remember before initiating the search.
First thing first, we need to start with what information we know. We will investigate a person called afutami. She’s an environmental economist working for The World Bank. Her real name is Andhyta Firselly Utami, she’s also a consultant and climate policy analyst. She is widely known as Afu. Afu is the co-founder and CEO of Think Policy Society, you can watch her youtube channel at Frame & Sentences. She graduated from the University of Indonesia and finished her Master’s in Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. Yass, she’s a badass. This is her Instagram account, take a look.
Then we need to define our requirements like what exactly we want to get. In this case, I need more about Afu’s personal information.
After we define the requirements, we need to decide what kind of OSINT’s tool is needed for gathering the data. I watched Sherlock growing up, I’m pretty much into a spy, mystery, and riddle kinda stuff so I want to give a try on a tool called ‘Sherlock’. Now we need to look up for Afu. So we need to search the username to trace her across various sites. Just follow the last formula. Change the ‘username’ into ‘afutami’.
Bloody hell, this is what we got. Now our job is to check whether all of them is afutami that we’re looking for. It is the part where after collecting the data we need to start to analyzing it. You know what you see is not necessarily true, even salt looks like sugar.
root@hacktivisst)-[~/Desktop/sherlock/sherlock]
└─# python3 sherlock afutami
[*] Checking username afutami on:
[+] 1337x: https://1337x.to/user/afutami/
[+] About.me: https://about.me/afutami
[+] Academia.edu: https://independent.academia.edu/afutami
[+] AllMyLinks: https://allmylinks.com/afutami
[+] Apple Discussions: https://discussions.apple.com/profile/afutami
[+] AskFM: https://ask.fm/afutami
[+] Disqus: https://disqus.com/afutami
[+] Duolingo: https://www.duolingo.com/profile/afutami
[+] Ello: https://ello.co/afutami
[+] Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/afutami
[+] Flipboard: https://flipboard.com/@afutami
[+] Freesound: https://freesound.org/people/afutami/
[+] GitHub: https://www.github.com/afutami
[+] GoodReads: https://www.goodreads.com/afutami
[+] Gravatar: http://en.gravatar.com/afutami
[+] HackerOne: https://hackerone.com/afutami
[+] IFTTT: https://www.ifttt.com/p/afutami
[+] Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/afutami
[+] Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/afutami
[+] Linktree: https://linktr.ee/afutami
[+] Medium: https://medium.com/@afutami
[+] Memrise: https://www.memrise.com/user/afutami/
[+] Periscope: https://www.periscope.tv/afutami/
[+] Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/afutami/
[+] Quizlet: https://quizlet.com/afutami
[+] Roblox: https://www.roblox.com/user.aspx?username=afutami
[+] Scribd: https://www.scribd.com/afutami
[+] SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/afutami
[+] Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/user/afutami
[+] Strava: https://www.strava.com/athletes/afutami
[+] TETR.IO: https://ch.tetr.io/u/afutami
[+] Telegram: https://t.me/afutamiStart for the first link https://about.me/afutami. About.me, known as a blurb is a platform to tell Afu’s reader about her professional background, key accomplishments, personal values, and any brand she may be associated with. Always remember, one piece of information may be linked to another information. By clicking the link and opening Afu’s profile through about.me, it led us to another information. You can see below, without me searching for Afu’s Blog she’s already put it there.
The same thing happened with her other platforms. Through her ask.fm I found her writings in WordPress, open her Gravatar and I found her Yahoo! email, and so for Medium, I got her Twitter account. Even I got Afu’s Linktree and found all the jackpots I need to reach her. After we analyze all the data, we might find that some of them were outdated, so remember that do pivot as needed using newly gathered data. Keep searching.
After a long search, the thing that really draw my attention was this. I never taught that Afu would have a GitHub account. I know programming is pretty much important these days, but judging from Afu’s educational background, programming may be no need such that urgencies to support her working field. But who knows tho, she’s the one who studies at Harvard, not me LOL. Maybe she learns programming just at a very basic level, you can see at her Repositories. Hello-World program generally is a computer program to illustrate the basic syntax of a programming language. It is often the first program written by people learning to code.
If you ask me how sure I am that it was Afu’s GitHub, I just look at her picture profile. That avatar also with one she used in SCRIBD is made from her Gravatar. Gravatar created by Tom Preston-Werner is a service for providing globally unique avatars. This is actually the part of OSINT where I need to validate my assumptions.
Move on from that, here is some information I got from my little investigation. Afu’s Pinterest and Unsplash give a little bit sense of her interest. Open up her Soundcloud and found out that her singings are not bad you know (don’t bully me I don’t even sing tho). Through her Spotify, I know what music genre she’s into. Last, I never thought that she also writes stories on Wattpad. Now we finally reach the edge of the investigation, when people make it through all the steps they need to generate the report.
So did our activity is illegal? No. We gather information from publicly accessible resources where the target is very conscious about her/his decision to share the information that we’re looking for. Things get illegal when we start to do Doxing or the dark side of OSINT.
Doing this investigation using Sherlock is no different from one of your stalking crush methods, it just that using Sherlock help you to more in structure, get faster and further, and also give you various perspective you’d never know you needed.
Conclusion
Never use the same username for your Tinder account if you on a relationship (kidding).
