People Search on Social Networking Sites

Agape HearTs
3 min readMar 27, 2024

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Searching for a particular person on a social networking website is fairly easy. Social networking services are online services, platforms, or sites that focus on facilitating the building of social networks or social relations among people. These websites contain information provided by users in their profiles. They help relate people directly or indirectly to each other through various fields, such as common interests, work locations, and education.

Social networking sites allow people to share information quickly, as they can update their personal details in real time. Such sites allow users to update facts about upcoming or current events, recent announcements and invitations, and so on. Social networking sites are a great platform for finding people and their related information. Many social networking sites allow visitors to search for people without registering on the site; this makes people searching on social networking sites an easy and anonymous task. A user can search for a person using the name, email, or address. Some sites allow users to check whether an account is active, which then provides information on the status of the person being searched.

Social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, and Instagram allow you to find people by name, keyword, company, school, friends, colleagues, and the people living around them. Searching for people on these sites returns personal information such as name, position, organization name, current location, and educational qualifications. In addition, you can also find professional information such as company or business, current location, phone number, email ID, photos, videos and so on. Social networking sites such as Twitter are used to share advice, news, concerns, opinions, rumors, and facts. Through people searching on social networking services, an attacker can gather critical information that will help them in performing social engineering or other kinds of attacks.

People Search on People Search Services

You can use public record websites to find information about email addresses, phone numbers, house addresses, and other information. Many individuals use online people search services to find information about other people. Generally, online people search services such as Spokeo,

Intelius, pipl, BeenVerified, Whitepages, and PeekYou provide people's names, addresses, contact details, date of birth, photographs, videos, profession, details about their family and friends, social networking profiles, property information, and optional background on criminal checks. Further, online people search services may often reveal the profession of an individual, businesses owned by a person, upcoming projects and operating environment, websites and blogs, contact numbers, important dates, company email addresses, cell phone numbers, fax numbers, and personal e-mail addresses. Using this information, an attacker can try to obtain bank details, credit card details, past history, and so on. This information proves to be highly beneficial for attackers to launch attacks. There are many available online people search services that help in obtaining information regarding people.

Example:

People Search Service - Spokeo

Source: https://www.spokeo.com

Attackers can use the Spokeo people search online service to search for peopl to the target organization. Using this service, attackers obtain information such as numbers, email addresses, address history, age, date of birth, family membe.... profiles, and court records.

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