Instagram OSINT Tools, Tips, Techniques

By Garrett •  Updated: 07/22/20 •  3 min read

As you know, Instagram OSINT is always changing, and so this page will be updated regularly. Please join the newsletter (bottom of page) to be notified of updates.

Instagram OSINT Guide

The Instagram OSINT guide is coming soon!

Instagram OSINT Tips

  1. Most of the time, you’ll be using Google Dorking instead of Instagram’s built-in search engine.
  2. To search only Instagram posts, use site:instagram.com/p in Google.
  3. To search only Instagram profiles, use site:instagram.com "[first name]" | "[first name] [last name] on" (including quotes"", but remove the brackets[]) on Google.
  4. More Instagram OSINT tips coming soon.

Instagram OSINT Tools

Case Studies

Case 1: Find user name with real name and possible associate account (such as company they work for or own).

This case can be seen on Reddit. First, their question:

instagram advanced search
lets say that I am looking for a “John Doe” on instagram who I know has posts related to “johndoeacademy”. Is there a way for me to search instagram with filters so that it only shows me results for John Doe’s who have posts related to johndoeacademy?

Posted by u/historicalrhino

My solution:

I’m a little unsure of some specifics here. Is “johndoeacademy” a hashtag or a username?

If it’s a username, I would use Google Dorking (AKA Google Hacking) to do this.

site:instagram.com/p "@johndoeacademy" & "John on" | "John Smith on" -site:instagram.com/johndoeacademy

Breakdown:

site:instagram.com/p tells Google we only want to search for results from Instagram.com/p which is what all posts are under.

"@johndoeacademy" tells Google we only want to search for any pages (posts) by @johndoeacademy, so we need to add -site:instagram.com/johndoeacademy to remove most (if not all) posts by @johndoeacademy.

Since we’re pulling up any page that mentions @johndoeacademy, we want to add & "John on" | "John Smith on" which will help limit a lot of the SERs (Search Engine Results) down to Instagram Profiles. & makes sure we’re including these searches so the SER must have “@johndoeacademy” AND “John on” OR “John Smith on”, with | representing the OR.

Here’s an example:

site:instagram.com/p "@zuck" & "Harvard on" | "Harvard University on" -site:instagram.com/zuck

Drop that in Google and see what you get. We’ll get 3 SERs:

A screenshot of Google showing the results for an Instagram OSINT search.

You can see it prioritized the Harvard ones over the Saverin one because of what we specified we were searching for.

Also, as /u/JackedRightUp said, you can change “site:” to “+” to get broader SERs for checking Instagram caching sites.

Example:

+Instagram "@zuck" & "Harvard on" | "Harvard University on" -site:instagram.com/zuck

or 

+instagram.com/p "@zuck" & "Harvard on" | "Harvard University on" -site:instagram.com/zuck

Garrett

I'm a cyberpunk building a better world.