R-SHE
Sherlock
Hunts for a username across hundreds of social media and web platforms for OSINT.
OVERVIEW
Sherlock takes a single username and checks it against a maintained list of hundreds of sites — social networks, forums, gaming platforms, developer communities — reporting back everywhere an account with that exact handle exists. It's a common step once a username surfaces from an email breach, a company's naming convention, or another OSINT tool.
Because it only checks whether a profile URL resolves (and applies site-specific logic to avoid false positives from generic "not found" pages), it's fast and produces a link list an analyst can then manually verify and pivot from.
USE CASES
Practical use cases
- 01
Pivoting from a leaked or guessed username to every social platform where it's registered.
- 02
Building a profile of an employee's public online presence for a social-engineering assessment.
- 03
Confirming whether a suspicious handle seen in a phishing campaign has a real public footprint.
- 04
Cross-checking usernames found via theHarvester, breach data, or GitHub against social platforms.
QUICK START
During people-focused OSINT, once you have a candidate username, to see everywhere else that identity is (or was) registered.
- Install Sherlock and its Python dependencies.
- Run it against the candidate username to check it across all supported sites.
- Manually open the returned links to confirm they belong to the actual target, not a namesake.
- Note confirmed profiles for the OSINT/social-engineering section of the report.
sherlock target_username --timeout 10BEFORE YOU RUN IT
What to check before running it
Site layouts change constantly, so both false positives and false negatives happen — always manually confirm a hit before citing it.
A shared or common username can return accounts belonging to a different person entirely; corroborate with other identifying details.
Running it generates real requests to dozens of third-party sites from your IP — be mindful of that if OPSEC on the lookup itself matters.