Last updated: April 30, 2022 | 8 views
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.
Socialscan Command-Line Tool To Check For Email And Social Media Username Usage Features
Features that differentiate socialscan from similar tools (e.g. knowem.com, Namechk, and Sherlock):
- 100% accuracy: socialscan’s query method eliminates the false positives and negatives that often occur in similar tools, ensuring that results are always accurate.
- Speed: socialscan uses
asyncioalong withaiohttpto conduct all queries concurrently, providing fast searches even with bulk queries involving hundreds of usernames and email addresses. On a test computer with average specs and Internet speed, 100 queries were executed in ~4 seconds. - Library / CLI: socialscan can be executed through a CLI, or imported as a Python library to be used with existing code.
- Email support: socialscan supports queries for both email addresses and usernames.
Install Socialscan Command-Line Tool To Check For Email And Social Media Username Usage
pip
Install from source
> 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
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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:
Or read more here.
