Show HN: I built an app that scans every social media network for your username (opens in new tab)

You should also mention you are using Sherlock as the underlying backend which does that actual searching as you did in this post.

https://old.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/z1ts1n/i_built_an_a...

S̵h̵e̵r̵l̵o̵c̵k̵ ̵u̵s̵e̵s̵ ̵M̵I̵T̵ ̵l̵i̵c̵e̵n̵s̵e̵ ̵a̵n̵d̵ ̵y̵o̵u̵ ̵s̵t̵i̵l̵l̵ ̵h̵a̵v̵e̵n̵'̵t̵ ̵a̵d̵d̵e̵d̵ ̵M̵I̵T̵ ̵l̵i̵c̵e̵n̵s̵e̵ ̵t̵o̵ ̵y̵o̵u̵r̵ ̵r̵e̵p̵o̵.̵

https://github.com/sherlock-project/sherlock

https://github.com/bnkc/handlefinder

With that said, I like the look of the UI you put on top, great work!

Edit: As others have pointed out, the author doesn't need to make their creation MIT as well. I misunderstood the license agreement. They just have to include the notice of the dependencies somewhere. TIL.

I found myself scrolling through Github’s “trending” repos, looking for some coding inspiration. Within the next hour, I stumbled across something called The Sherlock Project. Interesting, It had over 35k stars, must be pretty popular.

I quickly cloned the repo and started toying around with it. It didn’t take me long to realize the power of this tool. All I had to do was insert a username, and voila! I was looking at every social media website that was associated with the username. Not only that but direct links to the accounts.

I immediately wanted to turn this into a web app so that everyone could use it. My first challenge was that this was a CLI tool, so I got to work. The Sherlock project makes about 400 requests to various site s to check if your username exists. This was going to be tough... I noticed they were using requests.FutureSession to multithread the result.

I decided to use a multithreaded Web-socket to continuously report out data to the frontend. After ALOT of trial and error I finally got something working. The Issue now though was that it wouldn't run in production due to a multiprocessing error: Daemonic processes are not allowed to have children.

Eventually I learned that you cant use the standard multiprocessing library for this kind of thing, you had to use billiard. Bam! It worked. I quickly hacked together a simple frontend, configured the web socket, and results were pouring in.

Turns out, the web-socket is considered a "long running request" as it makes 400 external requests. Maybe I could use celery to offload this process to a worker and queue it up. I started working on it and realized this was a little out of my skill range.

I then decided to take a look at the logs where I hosted the code and what do i find? CPU, Memory, and bandwidth all reaching a staggering 100% usage. I was using the free tier of Render that only allowed for one instance of my app...duh. I did some rework of my codebase and it started running a little faster.

Needless to say, I learned to take it slow, build tests for my code, and be patient with results.

What do you guys think? Any hard lessons learned in coding? What were your takeaways?

Here is also a link to the repo: https://github.com/bnkc/handlefinder

Be warned people. You might find accounts you don't remember making. lmao

A trip down memory lane.

A bunch of the occurrences it "finds" appear to be false positives, as far as I can tell.

I don't want to rain on anyone's parade, but I'll just add my unsolicited opinion...

Functionality like this, and more acutely, any kind of cross-service, cross-account stylometrics correlation or de-anonymizing service gives me great concerns for its abuse and the groups that it likely endangers (and the groups it likely empowers).

False positive bug list. These always return a match even if there is none:

Archive of Our Own

Dribbble

Enjin

Fiverr

HackerNews

Instagram

Quizlet

Smule

We Heart It

livelib

Some people are liking the UI here, but it wasn't clear to me at first that a [+] meant the username was used on that site. In my mind, it could just as easily mean that it's available on that site (that could be a positive result if you're looking for places to sign up with a name). This should be made more clear.

It would be interesting if you could toggle on the not-found list as part of the results. If you get a big positive list, but you'd like to find the sites where the username is not in use yet, there's no quick way to get that info. (Yes you could scrape both lists and use some simple command line scripts to get those results, but it's such a simple thing to add to this tool)

Great tool I used it to find all social accounts of my ex. Anyway, got to go as I am outside her house and don't want to miss her leaving for work.

/s if it wasn't obvious.

Cool tool.

Seems the HN one doesn’t work

There is a similar iOS app implement in pure swift, run directly on your iPhone, open App Store and Search: Maigret to download this app.

This tool is very fast! I used it to find my crush's social profiles and it worked well.

Add "Show HN:" to the title to have more time in the spotlight, since you built this.

I tried this with my usual username (which is unusual; not many Griscoms out there), and found some false positives.

The following sites gave me errors with my username, and if I changed the username to something unlikely I got the same error. I take this to mean that there's no evidence that username exists on that system. (And, I'm dubious that I'd have signed up at these sites.) * quizlet.com * www.enjin.com * apps.runescape.com * smule.com * livelib.ru

And, fiverr.com's URL for my username just bounces to the homepage, as did any username. (Again, I wouldn't have signed up there.)

Other than that, very cool.

Reminds me of this, which popped up recently here: https://github.com/soxoj/maigret

I am using an un-pronouncible combination of 4 characters in some games. Never could not get it anywhere I wanted it. Was surprised to see it found on 60 sites, none of them me.

My username here is found on only 50, the other 49 not me.

It might be a useful tool to pre-check names before creating accounts for someone who wants a consistent name everywhere.

Why use React for something this light? People wants to use a frontend frameworks for everything now, I miss 1998. Just kidding, great work! Way more accessibly to the average person than the Sherlock CLI.

Also you have two requiments.txt's FYI.

Hmmm... I searched a name and it found 9 results. But none of the profiles actually existed when I followed the links.

Mind you, I've never fond these kind of things to be very effective. Bellingcat has a selection of similar tools and the results are always pretty unreliable:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/18rtqh8EG2q1xBo2cLNyh...

I got a false positive on runescape, fiverr, and tiktok for my username (not this one).

.. just ran the iOS MAIGRET tool report [massively granular-thus more false positives + a shit tonne of server errors] against your tool. Enlightening.

This is amazing! My only fear is that it will benefit more stalkers than genuine users.

Shows me on something called smule which I don't have an account on.

Now auto-create that account and offer user to buy it for few bucks

great, it works (with some false-positive, like Enjin for example).

A warning: an account could be suspended (since many still cannot let you remove it), and by logging in again you end up re-activating.

just be aware

Lot of results! Thanks

.. excellent tool .. TWO coffee's for you!

And that's why I prefer making a username per site I use. No need to connect the dots, no need for this tool, except for spying on a person.

.. added to my OSINT tools.

Lots of false positives

you made a web frontend for Sherlock LMAO