As an OSINT investigator, knowing a person’s usernames is like knowing their aliases. Oftentimes people reuse the same username, as an alternate ID, and this makes profiling and data gather a bit easier. One caveat, a user may use a username shared by others, but if it’s very specific then there’s less chance of pollution.

Tools

WhatsMyName.app

The website, https://whatsmyname.app, has a username lookup. It will search a variety of online locations for the username, and see if they get a 200 OK, to validate the username exists at that site. Links are provided for a checking the results.

Sherlock

The Python utility Sherlock can be pulled down from GitHub and installed. It works similar to Whatsmyname.app, except it’s offline. I think the results from Sherlock are a bit more than from whatsmyname.app.