digital-footprint

Digital dossier: connecting the dots

Profile pages you never knew existed. All collected, sorted and listed by a more powerful tool than Sherlock: Maigret.

Andras Kora

Andras Kora

— 3 min read
Digital dossier: connecting the dots

More powerful than Sherlock, similarly free and open source. Easy to use and reaches out to thousands of websites. Can even handle name variants. Sounds like a much better tool?

Yup. This is Maigret.

What does it do better?

  • Better reach: claiming to support more than 3000 websites; in my case this number was 2647.
  • Recursive search: this means that if it finds another related username on a found profile page it searches for that one too.

Simply by just these two enhancements over Sherlock, it offers better coverage.

This is how it looks like:

❯ maigret andraskora --permute --all-sites --csv
[-] Starting a search on top 2647 sites from the Maigret database...
[*] Checking username andraskora on:
[+] Trello: https://trello.com/andraskora
        ├─id: 5134cbb7bed1c1a73b004875
        ├─username: andraskora
        ├─fullname: Andras Kora
        ├─image: https://trello-members.s3.amazonaws.com/5134cbb7bed1c1a73b004875/4dbf0d9e984db74f219893debfc4b7c6/170.png
        ├─type: normal
        ├─is_verified: True
        ├─gravatar_url: https://gravatar.com/
        └─gravatar_username: andraskora
[+] Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/andraskora
[+] YouTube User: https://www.youtube.com/@andraskora
[+] YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@andraskora
[+] Slack: https://andraskora.slack.com
[+] Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/andraskora
[+] opensea.io: https://opensea.io/accounts/andraskora
[+] Artstation: https://www.artstation.com/andraskora
[+] Livemaster: https://www.livemaster.ru/andraskora
[+] Duolingo: https://www.duolingo.com/profile/andraskora
[+] TechPowerUp: https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/members/?username=andraskora
[+] Picuki [Instagram]: https://www.picuki.com/profile/andraskora
[+] GitLab: https://gitlab.com/andraskora
         ├─uid: 2614073
         ├─fullname: Andras Kora
         ├─username: AndrasKora
         ├─state: active
         ├─image: https://gitlab.com/uploads/-/system/user/avatar/2614073/avatar.png
         ├─gravatar_url: https://gravatar.com/
         └─gravatar_username: AndrasKora

Offering a nice progress bar while running you also get a sense of how long it will roughly take to cover all sources.

Searching |██████████████████████████████▏         | ▇▇▅ 1994/2647 [75%] in 1:03 (~20s, 31.9/s)

The best of all - this is also true for Sherlock - you can save the search result in a CSV file, that you can later import into a spreadsheet to see all sorts of additional information, like the response code from the servers for each profile check.

The results of Maigret in a Google Sheet

This helps you determine if the profile page (with your username) actually exists or it's simply not there.

Which brings me to the main issues with both tools: regardless of using Sherlock or Maigret both of them brings quite a lot of false positives to the table; this is not necessarily the tool's fault:

In many cases the web server of the portal that the tool is visiting returns a response code that suggests that the page actually exists, while it's not.

Also, both tools often returns 404s or other non 2xx response codes, which you need to filter out yourself.

All in all, both tools get the job done: without these tools it would take a very long time to explore all major portals, knowing that you cannot possibly cover everything.

As suggested in my previous post what I would do with the results is to ask an LLM to convert it into a bookmarks file that can be easily imported into a web browser.

This way you will have a convenient list of links that you can just click through and delete the irrelevant ones.

As a final result you will have a comprehensive, clickable list of all of your online profile pages.

One final thought:

You may be wondering: am I being totally irresponsible and reckless displaying all of my personal information in this post?

Valid question!

Well, yes and no.

The truth is: this information is already available publicly, basically anyone can carry out these searches on my username.

Let me refer back to my previous post's key takeaway:

Can I use it to do a search on someone else's (user)name?
Yes. So please, be mindful.

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