Socialscan – Command-Line Tool To Check For Email And Social Media Username Usage

[Kev]

socialscan is an accurate command-line tool to check For email and social media username usage on online platforms, given an email address or username, socialscan returns whether it is available, taken or invalid on online platforms.

 

 

 

 

 

Other similar tools check username availability by requesting the profile page of the username in question and based on information like the HTTP status code or error text on the requested page, determine whether a username is already taken. This is a naive approach that fails in the following cases:

 

• Reserved keywords: Most platforms have a set of keywords that they don’t allow to be used in usernames (A simple test: try checking reserved words like ‘admin’ or ‘home’ or ‘root’ and see if other services mark them as available)
• Deleted/banned accounts: Deleted/banned account usernames tend to be unavailable even though the profile pages might not exist

 

Therefore, these tools tend to come up with false positives and negatives. This method of checking is also dependent on platforms having web-based profile pages and cannot be extended to email addresses. socialscan aims to plug these gaps by directly querying the registration servers of the platforms instead, retrieving the appropriate CSRF tokens, headers, and cookies.

 

Install Socialscan Command-Line Tool To Check For Email And Social Media Username Usage

 

pip

 

> pip install socialscan

 

> git clone https://github.com/iojw/socialscan.git  
> cd socialscan  
> pip install .

 

ocialscan Command-Line Tool To Check For Email And Social Media Username Usage

 

usage: socialscan [list of usernames/email addresses to check]

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  --platforms [platform [platform ...]], -p [platform [platform ...]]
                        list of platforms to query (default: all platforms)
  --view-by {platform,query}
                        view results sorted by platform or by query (default:
                        query)
  --available-only, -a  only print usernames/email addresses that are
                        available and not in use
  --cache-tokens, -c    cache tokens for platforms requiring more than one
                        HTTP request (Snapchat, GitHub, Instagram. Lastfm &
                        Tumblr), reducing total number of requests sent
  --input input.txt, -i input.txt
                        file containg list of queries to execute
  --proxy-list proxy_list.txt
                        file containing list of HTTP proxy servers to execute
                        queries with
  --verbose, -v         show query responses as they are received
  --show-urls           display profile URLs for usernames on supported platforms
                        (profiles may not exist if usernames are reserved or belong to deleted/banned accounts)
  --json json.txt       output results in JSON format to the specified file
  --version             show program's version number and exit

 

You can download Socialscan here: socialscan-v1.4.2.zip

 

Or read more here.

 

Sources:

• darknet.org.uk
• github.com