
Show HN: Socialscan – Check email address and username usage on online platforms - iojw
https://github.com/iojw/socialscan
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got2bhockey
FYI there is a tool (Spiderfoot) that has this capability specifically
targeting the OSINT space. You may be able to leverage the same method they
use to add more capabilities to this tool.

Spiderfoot -
[https://github.com/smicallef/spiderfoot/blob/master/modules/...](https://github.com/smicallef/spiderfoot/blob/master/modules/sfp_accounts.py)

Resource used by Spiderfoot to do account lookups -
[https://raw.githubusercontent.com/WebBreacher/WhatsMyName/ma...](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/WebBreacher/WhatsMyName/master/web_accounts_list.json)

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iojw
There’s a slight difference in approach between the Spiderfoot tool and
socialscan:

The linked tool uses a common approach which involves retrieving the account
page in question and looking at the HTTP status code and text on the page,
determine whether the username is in use. This makes it easy to expand it to a
large number of sites as long as they have web-based profile pages, but the
approach is error prone and not fully accurate (false positives and negatives
occur).

socialscan uses a different method of checking (mimicking verification calls)
that has to be implemented manually for each platform, but the accuracy of
results is guaranteed. Of course this doesn’t work on all sites, but it isn’t
dependent on platforms having public profile pages and can be expanded to
email addresses as well.

